“... 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 ...”

“... the same eternity. She asked with my words. This is a Great Kingdom that is missing a queen or a king. And I, for a moment, for just a second, believed we were understanding each other.The novel’s sections cycle through the main characters. First, Rivera Garza as first-person narrator, from her discovery of the body through to her uneasy relationship with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a bullet-bitten stump) in Cumberland Square (now Emmet Square) in Parsonstown (now Birr) in King’s County (now Co. Offaly) in now independent Ireland. But the truth seems to be that revulsion from the martial boy began within months of the Culloden celebrations. Horace Walpole (a great source for O’Keeffe) wrote as early as the summer of 1746 that ...”

“... which reworks ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’:Who said, ‘Peacock Pie’?      The old King to the sparrow:Who said, ‘Crops are ripe’?      Rust to the harrow:Who said, ‘Where sleeps she now?      Where rests she now her head,Bathed in eve’s loveliness’? –      That’s what I said.Who said, ‘Ay, mum’s the ...”

“... he had seen in Guiana, some way up the Orinoco, and to do so without provoking the Spaniards. The King agreed, although the Spanish ambassador warned him of the presence of Spanish settlements and although James was trying to arrange a marriage between the Prince of Wales and the Infanta Maria. The extreme improbability of there being no conflict must have ...”

“... To be a patriot was to be a spokesman for the ‘old ways’ of the people against the bad modern king, lords and parliament. Hazlitt mildly criticised this tendency in Cobbett’s left-wing ally, Sir Francis Burdett, who was always ‘wanting to go back to the early times of our Constitution and history in search of the principles of law ...”

“... their jobs at Göttingen after protesting against the suspension of the constitution by the new king of Hanover, Ernst August, in 1837. After the revolution of 1848 Jacob was briefly a representative at the Frankfurt National Assembly, where he supported the establishment of a constitutional monarchy over a united Germany. But he was a liberal rather than a ...”