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“... courts for the erroneous belief ‘that men had free will to do good and bad,’ and William Lambert, vicar from 1574 to 1592, used holy water in baptism freely, and preached rarely. Much of the work of conversion seems to have been done by a schoolmaster, John Leeche, who conducted house hold worship with larger ...”

“... as punishment for looking into Persephone’s box of beauty, but revived by her lover, Cupid. John Philip Kemble revived Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in 1802 with his sister, Sarah Siddons, in the role of Hermione. At the end of the play, when Leontes is introduced to a statue of the wife whom he believes to be long dead, Siddons, draped in ...”

“... a writer for film journals, one of which, Sequence, he co-founded with Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert. Along with Anderson and Tony Richardson, Reisz aimed to bring a version of auteurism to British film, and they did as much with the documentary movement Free Cinema. In 1959, Reisz directed We Are the Lambeth Boys, and he made his first feature film a ...”

“... home grown. British true crime tends to be about British killers – Ian Brady (See No Evil), John Christie (Rillington Place), the Wests (Fred and Rose), Dennis Nilsen (Des), Jeremy Bamber (White House Farm), Harold Shipman (Doctor Death) – while American true crime favours American atrocities. I don’t see my preference for the British product as ...”

“... they teamed up in Paris for The Seven Deadly Sins (1933), commissioned by the exotic Edward James (John Betjeman’s original patron), in which Lenya and James’s wife Tillie Losch played Anna I and Anna II. Offstage, the two Annas conducted an affair with each other. The Countess of Oxford and Asquith, reviewing the London production of The Seven Deadly ...”

“... poetry; had been anointed as the diabolic successor to Aleister Crowley; had nearly interested John Betjeman in socialism and A.J.P. Taylor in incense. But he was one of those modernists who could only have been formed by an observance of tradition: he needed an anchor as much as he wanted a sailor. I only knew him at the fag-end of his career, when the ...”

“... icon. In a later book, Frauds (1957), he dealt mercilessly with such miscellaneous charlatans as Lambert Simnel, George Psalmanazar, the 18th-century literary impostor, and Maundy Gregory, the honours-salesman and broker for the Zinoviev Letter. In the chapter on Gregory, he suggested that Gregory’s homosexuality explained his cult of The Seven Pillars of ...”

“... of the theorist André Bazin. British film studies were still in utero. Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert didn’t start the student magazine Sequence till a year after Great Expectations appeared. Anderson, it goes without saying, despised David Lean. Another energetic hater, Wyndham Lewis, wrote of London in his novel Rotting Hill (1951): ‘a monstrous ...”

“... In the summer of 1831, James Woods, master of St John’s College, Cambridge, and Wordsworth’s former tutor, decided that his college should have a portrait of its most celebrated living alumnus. He commissioned Henry William Pickersgill – an apprentice Spitalfields silk-weaver turned Royal Academician – to produce a full-length oil painting of Wordsworth in an appropriately sublime setting, and in the early autumn of 1832 Pickersgill made the journey to Rydal Mount ...”

“... took place late on the second day, once Heron had already confessed to Detective Chief Inspector John Renwick and Detective Inspector Colin Dudley, who had taken over the questioning from lower-ranking officers. You can hear them steering Heron in the direction they want him to go. When he suggests he attacked Nikki with a ‘metal bar’, they make it clear ...”

“... advocated, and blamed their failures on the dead weight of resistance at all levels of society. John Cook, Charles I’s prosecutor, said that ‘we would have enfranchised the people, if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom.’ William Sedgwick told the generals that ‘not one of a hundred will own what you set down as the public ...”

“... to a ‘boarder at the Institution Saint-Ange’, and to that establishment’s star teacher, Mlle Lambert, who devotes her mornings to ‘her thesis on Duns Scotus’. Half a century ago, such a detail would have passed muster as a symptom of the ludicrous benightedness of religious schools. Can it do so today, when Scotus seems to be the focus of a minor ...”

“... This idea of Wolfenden as a wash-out and the squanderer of a prodigious talent persuaded John Carey, one of his Oxford contemporaries, to find him ‘the least interesting’ of Faulks’s subjects. Not only does Carey challenge Faulks’s claim that ‘in some minor way he represented a generation’: he suggests he was ‘bizarrely ...”

“... more mocking posture, in another century and in another country, assumed by the American president John Adams: “It will never be pretended that any person employed . . . had interviews with the gods, or was in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven.”’ Wittreich spends the rest of the paragraph glossing Adams, and then moves on. Notice how his ...”

“... San was chiefly the work of the Dutch, and some British historians have accepted this view, but John Philip, a hawk-eyed missionary in the 1820s, knew that this wasn’t so. The system ‘which rendered the Dutch name so infamous’, he wrote, is now being carried on ‘in all its horrors’ under the British Government: ‘Impatient to obtain undisturbed ...”