“... he was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Research Fellowship to help him prepare a new edition of King Lear, a task at which he worked ferociously at first but never managed to complete. In the main, though, the Forties were for Berryman a decade of money struggles and career setbacks. These were also the years in which he began to manifest symptoms of the ...”

“... in a cave somewhere, waiting for a moment of national crisis to emerge and rescue his people, like King Arthur, Frederick Barbarossa or Owain Glyndwr. It’s easy to see why his medievalism drew him to the East, and to the Bedouin Arabs in particular. They lived sparely, healthily, openly. By contrast, modern England was ‘fat – obese’, and so green that ...”

“... had very bbbad luck with your weather, Mr Piper.’ Apocryphal or not, the remark stuck. Trust the king to get it wrong: Mr Piper couldn’t have had better weather; he had made it so. His stormclouds over the Round Tower are as darkly fatty as British Restaurant oxtail soup. A touch of excess came naturally to him; he warmed to the worn pinnacle and the ...”

“... cultured English cardinal in exile, Reginald Pole, who had a better claim than Henry VIII to be king of England, became a – not uncritical – admirer of the ambiguous Spaniard. In the 1530s, it looked as if Valdesianism might shape the future of the Western Latin Church. That it did not was largely thanks to the institution that is the main focus of ...”

“... and he was satisfied’ is how she describes a man with a prostitute. But readers admired the King James cadences: this was what great literature was supposed to sound like. Spurling, like some of Buck’s other biographers, charitably suggests that she first thought through her books in Chinese, translating as she went along; what sounds biblical is ...”

“... writes in her introduction. Curtis had no doubt about his promise. When the pop producer Jonathan King staged a talent search, he went down to London and presented himself – no songs, no band, just himself. When he was 16 he gave Deborah a valentine which begins: ‘I wish I were a Warhol silk screen … ’ Why a silk screen? Why not Warhol himself? It’s ...”

“... our understanding of power. At Berkeley he ran a seminar from which two other major books emerged: Peter Brown’s The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988), which explored the theme of carnality and spirituality, and Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), which offered a ...”

“... might occasionally sport his Nemean trophy in the theatre, but it is difficult to believe that Peter Quince and his assemblage of very amateur actors in A Midsummer Night’s Dream plausibly procured the real thing for Snug the joiner in the part of Lion. Bears were more plentiful in plays, especially for a few years after 1609 when, as we now know thanks ...”

“... The next, far more consequential, step is the genome editing of human embryos. As the geneticist Peter Visscher and bioethicist Julian Savulescu put it earlier this year in an article for Nature, genome editing has the potential to create ‘human phenotypes that have never been previously observed’. Stephen Hsu, founder of the embryo screening company ...”

“... This process has enriched our recent fiction – most remarkably, perhaps, the novels of Peter Ackroyd, D.M. Thomas, Beryl Bainbridge, Julian Barnes and Thomas Keneally, whose Schindler’s Ark was marketed in America (under a slightly different title) as non-fiction and in Britain as a novel. Writers of light fiction, too, have added to the ...”

“... who kept body and soul together on a minute stipend by writing facetious novels under the name of Peter Priggins. The Brookes’ wine shop – always known as the Office – was at Folkestone. They themselves lived at Sandgate, a more socially eligible strip of coast to the west. They also possessed an inland cottage at Bishopsbourne in the Elham ...”

“... worse he was spiking his diatribes with personal insults against a much-loved primate, Jakob Peter Mynster, who had died the year before. Kierkegaard had, until then, always appeared to share in the general veneration for Bishop Mynster. But now that Mynster was dead, and magnificently buried following a ceremony across the road in the Church of Our ...”

“... hard to look at the frontispiece of the first edition of Olive Schreiner’s short novel Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897). Titled ‘photograph’, it shows three dead African men hanging from a tree, their legs trussed with a farmer’s rope. Enjoying the sport are Englishmen in shirtsleeves and broad-brimmed hats, their grins set off by heavy ...”

“... youngest MP in the House. He was then a Tory. Cimmie had wanted a small, quiet wedding, but the King and Queen were present, as were the King and Queen of the Belgians, who were flown across the Channel in two two-seater aeroplanes for the occasion. The marriage lasted 13 years and there were three children – Nicholas ...”

“... for his deeply religious mother there was never any doubt: he was chosen, blessed, her own golden king. All through the pregnancy, Gladys Presley had attended her local Baptist church, the Tabernacle of the Assembly of God. This was a Pentecostal faith in which the happy ordeal of being born again was called the ‘burning love’; speaking in tongues was ...”