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“... and finally by a number of clerics. For many historians, this detail, recorded by the chronicler John of Worcester, would be no more than a fascinating piece of useless information. For Professor Jacques Le Goff, it is a clue which helps us to understand the 12th century a little better. Le Goff, whose collected essays, written between 1956 and 1976, and ...”

“... by the much decorated Audie Murphy. Oswald fixed his time and period just as the bank robber John Dillinger confirmed both the status of the FBI and the date, 22 July 1934, by getting himself shot to pieces emerging from the Biograph in Chicago, after watching Clark Gable play an amiable gangster in Manhattan Melodrama. While trying to ignore my ...”

“... individual cases, including those involving three cabinet ministers, Blunkett, Charles Clarke and John Prescott. Edis told the court that while their papers were busy hacking to find evidence of other people’s affairs – in January 2003 the Sun ran a story calling Andy Gilchrist, then leading the Fire Brigade Union in a series of strikes against the Blair ...”

“... single reference to Larbaud I was able to find in any text on Nabokov was a letter to a Professor John Kenneth Simon at the University of Illinois, sent from Montreux in February 1971, in which Nabokov says he does not remember ‘having ever read anything by Valery Larbaud – even in my youth when I absorbed a lot of contemporaneous French stuff’. Why was ...”

“... It was fortunate for George Eliot, or Marian Evans as she was in 1852, that the philosopher Herbert Spencer rejected her brave and desperate pleas for him to marry her. If he had accepted, she might well have found herself in something akin to Sarah Austin’s position as emotional and financial prop to a miserable, selfish hypochondriac ...”

“... rest away. Plum-picking explains why Dickens’s dealings with Chapman and Hall and Bradbury and Evans have survived, while the bulk of their papers have disappeared (some B&E materials washed up in the Punch archive; those of C&H were, apparently, thrown out when the firm was taken over by Methuen in 1938). Only after 1945 did large libraries become ...”

“... a wan light on pews reserved for the use of MPs in St Margaret’s, Westminster, are untypical of John Piper. Normally, his stained glass seethes, particularly in Coventry Cathedral, where a Piper sunburst behind the boulder that serves as a font irradiates a great wall of clunky fenestration. In Westminster though, in a building studded with fanciful ...”

“... to have emerged from that study. The classics of modern social science, whether Durkheim, Mauss, Evans-Pritchard or Weber, have all been obsessed by these issues, which they connect more or less closely with the very origins of our own society. Here the origins of social science and the origins of modern society are traced to the same source. Stolen ...”

“... have been more indulgent, though not everyone shares the glorious certainty of Sir Richard Evans, British Ambassador in Beijing from 1984 to 1988. He concludes that for most Chinese the Beijing massacre is a ‘blemish’ on a record that is ‘much more white than black’. Western governments were obliged to put Chinese human rights on their agenda ...”

“... a number of female special advisers. The civil service in Scotland was headed by a woman, Leslie Evans. When, in 2017, the Daily Mail ran a front-page photograph of Sturgeon and Theresa May with the headline ‘Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-it!’, May dismissed it as a bit of fun, but a spokesperson for Sturgeon responded: ‘Brexit may risk taking ...”

“... The places​ were Philadelphia and New York, the names were John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans and a few others, heirs to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, spoken of with awe in every version of the story. Something called West Coast jazz, thought by many to be an oxymoron, was making itself heard in the persons of Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Shelly Manne and Dave Brubeck ...”

“... continued ever since. Perhaps the most serious accusations were levelled by the British journalist John Cornwell, whose book Hitler’s Pope, published in 1999, in effect painted Pius XII as a Nazi sympathiser. Decades before his election as pope on 2 March 1939, Eugenio Pacelli had served as papal nuncio to Bavaria, and in this capacity had witnessed the ...”

“... help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.’ Only Edgar Evans died a rather commonplace death – at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier, of concussion after a fall. ‘He died a natural death,’ was all Scott could manage by way of an epitaph for him in the last message, but then ...”

“... in a company of about 198,000,’ Edwardes writes: his secretary, his personal assistant and John McKay, the communications director, all of whom had moved across from Chloride with the boss. It was some time before we hacks cottoned on to the fact that McKay was not an industrial public relations man in the surprisingly thoughtful mould of the motor ...”

“... one suspects, very much worse than death in the mind of the ageing Eurosceptic Tory. We know who John Gielgud was – the greatest English speaker of his generation, the lyre of English verse – but his letters tell a story of who he was underneath all that, or perhaps because of being all that. At 23, we find him writing to his mother from Newcastle about ...”