“... until some Scottish woman in the course of telling off the novelist Mark Haddon accuses him of ‘Alan Bennettish tweeness’. It’s not a serious injury to my self-esteem but rather as if someone passing me in the street has just turned back to give me a flying kick up the bum and then gone on their way. I hope for some mild objection from one of the other ...”

“... the music inside will come from Creation Records, the label which launched Oasis, whose founder, Alan McGee, gave Blair a cool £10,000 to nurture Young Labour and pay for the Youth Rally in Blackpool; it was the same McGee who presented Blair with the band’s platinum disk, and gave the now legendary riposte to Virginia Bottomley when invited to a bash for ...”

“... colleague who declined to drink with him on a Friday that he ‘had a Pope in his belly’. When Bishop Stillingfleet sent round his chaplain to vet Halley’s orthodoxy, the astronomer sent him away with a flea in his ear: ‘I declare myself a Christian and hope to be treated as such.’ Contemporary gossip put it about that he had slept with the wife of a ...”

“... to imply an unacceptable scientific tolerance. In a memoir published in 1955, a guardsman called Alan Roland echoed Winterton’s remarks of the year before when recording his disgust at the type of man he found hitting on him: ‘The police call him a homosexual – a too-pleasant term for a vile creature.’ ‘Queer’ was so much quicker and more ...”

“... was on show, accompanied by Judy Egerton’s fine catalogue, there was also a video, narrated by Alan Bennett. As it finished on the day I was there, the woman in front of me said to her friend: ‘Well, I should hope they weren’t all like that.’ It was a very Bennett moment, as distinct from a Hogarthian one. ‘Missing the point’ was not in ...”

“... by a Hapsburg Archduke who transferred to him a large sum of money. Accused of simony by his bishop, he was exonerated by the Vatican; on his death-bed he was refused extreme unction. In the 13th century this part of the Cevennes had been the centre of the Cathar or Albigensian movement, and the Cathar fortress of Montségur with its reputed treasure ...”

“... the keynote. And why not? But Leeds in those days was the proving ground for many a future dean or bishop, some of the grandest Anglican dynasties – Hollises, Bicker-steths, Vaughans – ministering to the slums of Hunslet and Holbeck. St Bartholomew’s was a great slum parish too, its huge black church set on a hill above Armley and Wortley, and though the ...”

“... section of the inquisitorial process put into action by an unusually active and conscientious bishop; Carnival on two accounts, one of them anonymous, of the events of 1579-80 in and around the city. The books contain comments on these sources, and on one aspect of the Carnival story one of the sources is skilfully used to get behind the silences and bias ...”

“... for two years in a cave, and then for a time inhabited an iron cage ... He became Bishop of Anastasioupolis, but ultimately resigned to return to monastic life’) and the Emperor Justinian, who was responsible for the introduction of draconian penalties against homosexual activity in the sixth century, instigating a vicious witch-hunt in ...”

“... It’s not easy to put aside our knowledge and inhabit their innocence. In The Stranger’s Child Alan Hollinghurst went to some trouble to shake the patronising certainty of retrospect, setting the first part of his novel before the First World War, the second part in the 1920s. Readers had to piece together what had happened in the interval, a lesser ...”

“... Over the course of the next few moves, Carlsen managed to bring his rook, knight and dark-square bishop into the attack. He advanced a pawn close to Caruana’s king, kept his own king out of danger, and had an extra half hour on the clock. It wasn’t a clear win for Carlsen, but he was certainly ahead. Rumours then began to circulate that Carlsen had ...”

“... Rates of education among the clergy had been very low in the early 16th century. In 1551, the bishop of Gloucester had found that 168 priests in his diocese were unable even to repeat the Ten Commandments, and court records from the time are full of complaints from parishioners about boozing, womanising village priests. The shabby reputation of Catholic ...”

“... divides between poems of here and elsewhere (a pattern which has become familiar since Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel), This Other Life is in five parts, with One, Three, and Five set in Britain and Two and Four in Italy. Within this oscillating progression, journeys abroad may involve returns (hence the first Italian poem is ‘There ...”

“... Other less controversial occupations include entrepreneur, man of letters, geologist and bishop, smooth muscle physiologist, inventor of the safari park, inventor of whimsical machines, ethnomusicologist, authority on animal behaviour, magnate in the fishing industry, and, unexpected but welcome, stockbroker. The years 1986-1990 saw a notable culling ...”

“... it as one of the few contemporary novels he liked. The book was reviewed in the New York Times by Alan Friedman, the author of a forgotten novel called Hermaphrodeity, who described it as ‘a nearly inscrutable mystery’ powered by ‘camp, vamp and very damp wit’. He praised White’s ‘poetic brilliance’ and ‘hard, gem-like style’ but ...”