“... and, known as Jeanne des Anges, she toured France, showing her hand to vast crowds, and to the King, the Queen and Cardinal Richelieu. In 1645, a visitor to Loudun, Balthasar de Monconys, went to see the prioress and her sacred hand. Only he did not simply observe; he reached out his hand to hers: ‘With the tip of my fingernail, with a light touch I ...”

“... knew what to celebrate. At the start of the opening ceremony – a service in St Paul’s – the King praised the nation’s courage in the world wars; the official handbook declared categorically that ‘Britain is a Christian Community’; brightly coloured pavilions on the South Bank paid tribute to picturesque countryside, seaside holidays and an ...”

“... no reference to Republicanism’. Similarly, and just as surprisingly, Townshend quotes Michael Collins, who had fought in 1916 and three years later became president of the IRB Supreme Council, insisting that ‘the cause was not the Irish Republic’ but ‘liberation from English occupation’.* Certainly it ‘did not change the relationship ...”

“... dead, Your wife, your child? Ros Schwartz is quoting here from a selection of Sachs in English by Michael Hamburger and others, whereas when it comes to rendering from Vietnamese, she offers the original transliterated, and then, working closely with Gansel, translates from her French versions, thereby forging a powerful echo chamber (even two steps removed ...”

“... pink flesh, so not as nice. This is our annual holiday, and as usual I set off in the boat with Michael, Niall, Arvin and Shaska to camp on Iniskeel. We land on the little strand, walk round the island, where we startle a big bouncy hare, then we pitch the tent, collect driftwood and cook over the fire. Later, when it’s dark, we toast marshmallows over ...”

“... for languages or football: because it’s beautiful. I have no idea what stars were rising when Michael Wood’s The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles pushed onto the planet’s surface, but so brainy a book must have a lot of air signs in its chart. It seems at first to have been born under the sign of Aquarius: analytical, determinedly ...”

“... autumn of 1938. Behind every teacher in every classroom in every school loomed a portrait of the king and a map of Greater Romania, the perfect circle within which, according to the curriculum and the powers that be, everybody lived happily doing various things in various sorts of traditional dress.In the sitting room at home, the man on the radio who ...”

“... work of a genuinely British Bard. ‘Chief Poet!’ Keats called him, sitting down to read King Lear again, ‘Begetter of our deep eternal theme!’ Unlike revolutionary France and America, Britain entered the 19th century without the benefit of a rationalised, written constitution. But in terms of making meaning, the works of the Chief Poet served as ...”

“... philistine that in retrospect he appears almost pathetically comical. In his books on Edward VIII, Michael Bloch has washed a great deal of the Abdication dirty linen in public, and much of the mud has stuck to the Duke of Windsor himself, to say nothing of the Duchess. Sarah Bradford’s biography of George VI portrayed him as the ultimate sacrificial ...”

“... of Violence at the Roundhouse. His sobering report had Allen Ginsberg and R.D. Laing, Trocchi, Michael X, and other disparate luminaries of the International Times devouring every word. We wanted to hear the worst, the spidery voice of doom: the prophetic voice of the Ancient of Days, Blake’s voice hallucinated in Harlem. We wanted to leaf through the ...”

“... Shaun Murphy, a solid player who was the world champion in 2005, named the retired footballer Michael Owen. Judd Trump, currently ranked second in the world, named the still-playing footballer Mason Mount. Mark Selby, who has been world champion four times and UK champion twice, said Nicko McBrain, the drummer from Iron Maiden. When the journalist asked ...”

“... Firth of Forth carrying a large quantity of gold and silver belonging to Charles I, the tomb of King Alaric I and treasure from King John’s baggage train. Oh, and the lost city of Atlantis. What Merlin Burrows is selling often seems too good to be true, but Blackburn says that its late founder, a ‘spectral ...”

“... is bad in a place. This too shall pass one day.’ It doesn’t pass, however. Like the maimed king Amfortas waiting to be touched by the Holy Spear, Sebastian’s hero lives with his open wound: ‘the consciousness of the sin of being a Jew’. The error of the Jews, he reflects, is that they observe too much and think that they, too, are being ...”

“... is not outside the world he criticises, he is part of it, and so are his friends and family,’ Michael Wood wrote in the LRB of 7 September 2000: ‘Social arrangements are foolish and apparently fragile, because they are arbitrary and groundless. Everything about them could be different, and is different in other times and places … And yet it is because ...”

“... to police violence against black people, but the protests against the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Freddie Gray were mostly confined to the cities in which the deaths had occurred. Obama was seen as sympathetic to BLM’s concerns, even if he offered little more than memorable speeches. Floyd’s death not only follows the killings of Breonna ...”