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“... After the Reformation, ‘maumet’ began to be used as a derogatory epithet for Catholic idols: Thomas Becon, for example, complains of ‘antichristian monsters’ who teach people ‘to run a Pilgrimage to this and that Idol, to paint this tabernacle, and to gild that maumet’. The Island Princess’s ‘maumet gods’ would have registered as an ...”

“... The human family’, Henry Drummond wrote in The Ascent of Man (1894), is ‘the starting-point and threshold of the true moral life’. Man carries ‘old wild blood in his veins’, while woman makes a home: her passivity is ‘the embryo of patience’. Children, closer to nature, need moral training at their mother’s side ...”

“... It could only have been written by an author who had tested his resources many times before. Hugh Thomas’s Havannah is a very different kind of achievement. Here is an accomplished writer actually changing harness, and exchanging the sober caparison of the historian for the showier trappings of the historical novelist. In his capacity as Lord ...”

“... home is a personage from classical poetry rather than 18th-century agriculture. Gray’s friend Thomas Wharton noted: ‘In England the ploughman always quits his work at noon. Gray, therefore, with Milton, painted from books and not from life.’ He did not seem to mean this as a point against the poet, even if Wordsworth would have taken it as a ...”

“... he had used for his early work. Culliford was the second name of Charles’s maternal uncle, Thomas Barrow, a cultured man who had forbidden Dickens’s father ever again to enter his house after the latter’s failure to honour a debt led to his paying £200 as a guarantor. Dickens identified with this more respectable side of the family and often ...”

“... to Europe, self-culture, social relations – a comparable canvas to the novels of his brother Henry. Above all, William wanted – for himself and others – to be well enough to fulfil a more conventional plot than one of Henry’s: to marry and to work (including ‘inner work’, or self-culture).Contemplating ...”

“... For the Sake of Argument records a life of action, of being in the right place at the right time. Thomas Mann could never find the revolution: Hitchens cannot help tripping over it. This is, no doubt, the privilege of the foreign correspondent, but some are clearly more privileged than others. He turns up in Central America, in Central Europe, in Eastern ...”

“... not impossible, to imagine Bernard Shaw at a loss for words. The thing indeed occurred in 1928 at Thomas Hardy’s funeral, when Shaw and Kipling were paired in the procession of mourners but could find nothing whatever to say to each other. Shaw’s own excuse was that it was absurd to have coupled such a tall man with such a very short one. This is very ...”

“... In July 1785, Thomas Jefferson, then American Ambassador to France, paid a visit to the dungeon of the Château de Vincennes. Its three-metre-thick walls had previously imprisoned Diderot and the Marquis de Sade. Now, however, it housed the workshop of a gunsmith, Honoré Blanc, and a dozen assistants. As Jefferson watched, Blanc sorted into bins the pieces of 50 musket flintlocks: ‘tumblers, lock plates, frizzens, pans, cocks, sears, bridals, screws and springs ...”

“... required to draw a map of old Palestine, ‘indicating the position of the Jewish tribes’. Thomas Jervis’s map of the Crimean peninsula Biblical Palestine loomed large in the teaching of geography for generations of British children: I can remember drawing maps of it at Sunday school in the 1960s, to accompany my own newspaper supplement featuring ...”

“... a three-hour account of the Civil War and Reconstruction adapted from a popular melodrama by Thomas Dixon, was the longest, costliest and most spectacular American movie to date. The screen had never been filled with so many actors and so much action; battle scenes had never been so vivid; and the past had never been represented with such immediacy. At ...”

“... My second moment came when Professor H.W.R. Wade QC – as of the Queen’s Birthday Honours, Sir Henry Wade – was called to the witness box. Now Wade is not only a gentle giant of a man – but one of transparent distinction and complete modesty. It was duly extracted from him that he had been Professor of English Law at Oxford from 1961 until 1976 and ...”

“... It was written sometime between 1939 and 1941 – Capote was born in 1924 – to his schoolmate Thomas Flanagan. Flanagan kept it all his life. It read: ‘I do hereby solemnly affirm that any statements I may have made about Thomas Flanagan, or said that he had made, were calumnies and lies on my part. Truman ...”

“... the Venerable Bede, and its modern exponents include such engaging and stylish writers as Charles Thomas, Leslie Alcock and Henry Mayr-Harting. The literary sources have attracted much idiosyncratic talent, for they possess the fascination of a cryptic crossword in which one must sift fact from propaganda, post-Norman ...”

“... who occupied comparable positions of high office, an unusual set of characters emerges. One is Henry Wallace, vice-president under Roosevelt, who committed political suicide in 1946 in front of an audience of twenty thousand in Madison Square Garden with these words: Russian ideas of social-economic justice are going to govern nearly a third of the ...”