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“... another, and without a grasp of which the political language of the past can be unintelligible. More interest is now taken in the culture of a period than in its economics, while the study of high politics seems jejune when it lacks a cultural dimension. Although the depth and durability of that trend cannot yet be judged, it is likely to gather strength ...”

“... sections, however, and from the late medieval period up to the end of the 19th century Ackroyd more or less dispenses with chronology and arranges his material thematically. Set-piece chapters on staging-post events keep up a sense of time passing, but the core of the book is made up of essays on such topics as drinking, natural ...”

“... would not see up her skirt. It was a gesture at once gracious and gruesome, and the verse that Sir Thomas Wyatt (probably) wrote on the occasion from the Tower of London is equally dark (‘circa Regna tonat’ means ‘it thunders around the throne’): The bell towre showid me suche syght That in my head stekys day and nyght There dyd I lerne out of A grate ...”

“... a line on it. The line was to defend suicides against the customary condemnation by claiming, like Thomas Hood in ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, that their despair was the effect of a general lack of Christian charity in the field of social relationships. He illustrated this by invoking the oppressive use of parental or paternal authority, particularly against ...”

“... Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour made their celluloid expedition there in the 1940s. Sir Thomas More, who first wrote of the place, lost his head completely, for non-Utopian reasons, and since then a succession of charismatic cranks, frenzied philosophers and visionary vegetarians have aspired to realise heaven upon earth while ...”

“... had an in-and-out relationship with the government of Henry VIII, and a controversy in print with Thomas More. In May 1535, when the government of the Emperor Charles V was persecuting Protestants in the Netherlands, he was betrayed to the authorities and, despite an attempt by Thomas Cromwell to have him sent to ...”

“... another, complaining morosely about the food and wine, and fretful that he was not able to spend more time at home.Vaughan’s life revolved around the two cities of London and Antwerp. He was born around 1500 into a London mercantile family of Welsh descent and was probably educated at St Paul’s School; he seems to have known its founder, John Colet. His ...”

“... was ideally proportioned for the division that was eventually made of it. No inland location lay more than two days’ march from the coast, which gave a marked advantage to maritime invaders. The position of the main estuaries – the Solway, the Clyde, the Forth, the Dee, the Severn, the Thames and the Humber – made it possible for each of the ...”

“... both famous and infamous, and famous not for a few minutes but for ever. Three centuries later, Thomas Carlyle will write that but for you there would have been no French Revolution, no America. This is what happened not in a dream but metaphorically to Martin Luther, a hitherto obscure monk and professor of theology in an undistinguished university ...”

“... worthless racket. Our Lady’s Gild threw its considerable resources at the case. It appealed to Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s indispensable right hand: cardinal, archbishop, lord chancellor, Wolsey was a formidable broker of power. And it also bought the services of a clever (and therefore expensive) attorney. This was ...”

“... the Old Testament, appealed to something very deep in the human spirit, that the whole issue grew more complex. Dr Aston is particularly interesting on Luther, who, like Wycliffe before him, was much less extreme than many who later invoked him. Luther was among those to whom an image and an idol were not the same thing: an image was only transformed into an ...”

“... The structural ironies of Edward Thomas’s life still condition his reputation. Just as he made a late poetic start, so criticism has been slow to gather momentum. Even the recent spate of studies – by Michael Kirkham, Stan Smith, and the contributors to Jonathan Barker’s Art of Edward Thomas – seems more fortuitous than co-ordinated ...”

“... with the printed word was central. Recent scholarship has broken up this grand narrative into a more tentative story of change, replacing technological agency with a messy world of collaboration, muddle, money, contingency and imperfection. Less a confident stride towards modernity, the Renaissance book now looks stranger: not quite yet a thing of our ...”

“... Craftsmen were ordered to wear appropriate clothes. Their wives should wear cheap shoes. No more silk or silver cloth. No more embroidery or enamelling. No more gold brooches, silver clasps, chains or bracelets. No more precious stones, belts or ...”

“... Its predecessor, Wolf Hall, the first part of what will be a trilogy of novels about the life of Thomas Cromwell, carried the burden of beginning and perhaps also of containing too much history.* In it Thomas Cromwell frees Henry VIII from his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, engineers his union with Anne Boleyn by ...”