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“... a wretch, I wene, better worthy.’ And he was not, as it turned out, a man for quite all seasons. Henry VIII, whose faithful servant More professed to be and for the most part was, was a self-willed tyrant whose last resort against the papal refusal to sanction his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to Anne Boleyn was to dethrone the pope as ...”

“... didn’t prevent her from being visited by an admirer or two. In 1641, she gave a shilling to Mr Tom Aston and Mr Dick Gravell, who, she wrote, ‘cam to be my valantine’. As a single woman, she couldn’t attend female neighbours who were giving birth, but she would send money to midwives and nurses. When her niece produced twins, Jeffreys stood as ...”

“... Hawks’s Red River (1948) is not about equality but authority. It is a tale of two leaders: Tom Dunson (John Wayne) and his adopted son Matt Garth (Montgomery Clift). Dunson is the organiser of a massive cattle drive, starting out in south-west Texas and heading for a railroad in the Midwest. But the kinder and gentler Matt takes over when the cowhands ...”

“... envenomed pen. As these essays indicate, he is much better at dealing with the monstrous legacy of Henry Kissinger than scoffing at poor Bill Rodgers of the SDP (as he and it then were). And Britain was also constricting, especially if you were a radical left-wing journalist with an upper-class accent and a taste for good port. You could always affect a ...”

“... for in a letter written c.1599 we find his own nephew describing him as ‘that degenerate rogue Tom Drury’. He was the third son of Robert Drury of Hawstead, Suffolk, and Audrey née Rich, the daughter of Richard, Lord Rich, a former Lord Chancellor. He was born on 8 May 1551. Thirteen years older than Marlowe, he was in his early forties when he became ...”

“... Thierry of Chartres, himself recalling Plato. But many years before Alan or Thierry, the Emperor Henry III, dealing with a group of Czech sea-lawyers, had told them brusquely: ‘The law has a nose of wax, as they say in the vulgar, and the king a hand of iron.’ Henry was not recalling Plato, he was remembering a popular ...”

“... Quatermain sequence – which ran to 18 books – is bound, however, to remember the figure of Sir Henry Curtis, Bt. the English Victorian quasi-Viking whom Haggard carefully manoeuvred into situation after situation where he could fulfil the Dasent fantasy and fight, axe in hand and made-in-Birmingham mail-coat belted on, in blameless battle against ...”

“... in the Sixties was only about 10 per cent; and in their study of science fiction audiences, Henry Jenkins and John Tulloch note the continuing rejection of Star Trek by ‘the male establishment of literary science fiction fandom’. Actually, no group of fans can be called an establishment: none of them has any power at all, not even, for all the ...”

“... that Chaucer’s support was by this time worth soliciting, and points to failed attempts by Henry IV to recruit Christine de Pisan; Pearsall thinks Henry may not even have noticed. In the same way Strohm would like to see ‘Lak of Stedfastnesse’ not just as the tissue of literary commonplaces it is, but also as ...”

“... Hopkinson’s appeared this summer, it was reviewed in the Sunday Telegraph by her father, Sir Tom Hopkinson, Antonia White’s third husband and formerly editor of Picture Post. He announced that it had been ‘produced in secrecy and haste for fear of copyright proceedings by Susan’, and went on about ‘a long-running dispute between the two daughters ...”

“... compared to them; while his devoted mother and aunt gave a picture of him to his first biographer, Tom Moore, which insisted that ‘the friends he was entangled with pushed his destruction forward, screening themselves behind his valuable character.’ Stella Tillyard is the author of the excellent study Aristocrats, the first of a historical trilogy in which ...”

“... an archetypal irony in The Mill on the Floss, set in the early decades of the 19th century. Tom Tulliver hates school so much that he counts the days until he can come home, cutting them into a stick; his sister, Maggie, who isn’t sent to school, longs to know what the Latin in his textbook means. Although these words are the very instruments of ...”

“... from his mother. Matilda took Robert’s side against her husband and her younger sons, Rufus and Henry, and Orderic is good evidence for the Conqueror’s anger: one of her go-betweens sought sanctuary from a sentence of blinding in St Evroul, where Orderic met him. There were successive rapprochements, even after Robert had bested his father in hand-to-hand ...”

“... besides, or in spite of, the ones they depict. This isn’t a new charge – even an admirer like Henry James thought Burne-Jones’s ‘languishing type … savours of monotony’ – but that hasn’t stopped reviewers of the Tate show serving up stale critique. Jonathan Jones of the Guardian called Burne-Jones ‘stupid’, while to Waldemar Januszczak of ...”

“... games and nibbling at the edges of philosophical debate, sometimes in the company of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, H.G. Wells and the Webbs. Today they are easily characterised as an unripened Bloomsbury Group: a celebrity clique composed of men and women unconventional in dress and conversation, literary and artistic, overlapping in their sexual commitments, but ...”