“... taken the fateful step of becoming a Calvinist. He obtained the patronage of Louis Chasteignier, lord of La Roche-Pozay near Poitiers, and in 1565 accompanied him on a diplomatic mission to Italy. Despite his Calvinistic contempt for Italian scholars and the Catholic Church – he preferred talking Hebrew with the learned Jews of Mantua and Ferrara to ...”

“... purchase to establish efficient local monopolies in water and gas. The prospect of Irish Home Rule drove Chamberlain and his fellow Liberal Unionists out of the Gladstonian Liberal Party in 1886, and the Liberal Unionists found themselves in an increasingly close relationship with the Tories, eventually amalgamating with them. But Chamberlain, a ...”

“... she finds him becoming. It brings to his mind Ezekiel 37.3: ‘Mortal, can these bones live? Oh Lord God, you know.’ This is the powerful passage set in a valley of dry bones, where the bones come together, are covered with sinews, flesh and skin, breath is put into them and they live, ‘a vast multitude’. The scene is not one of ...”

“... or even the start of one, than its resolution. Occasionally something happens to bring this home to my profession when, after fighting like cocks for our living, we have bowed to the judge, gathered our papers and gone off for tea together. (Mon cher confrère, says the Daumier cartoon which adorns barristers’ walls like a talisman.) A wife, divorced ...”

“... or the sexual health of the nation might suffer accordingly. Goodbye.’ 15 January. We now have a home secretary who, on being told one of the prisoners in his care has committed suicide, says he feels like pouring himself a drink. This is a statement deplorable on so many levels they’re too wearying to list. But it will delight the Sun and the Daily Mail ...”

“... beginning of the story. Perhaps he, too, will now paint flower pieces in vivid colours; and set up home with Jacki. The Artist’s Widow is indefatigably up to date. It has everything: conceptual art and Conservatives with lost seats and abandoned mistresses, paedophilia, snuff movies, public relations women in suits, TV interviewers, suburban developments ...”

“... another of her lovers on some moody sapphic verses –The lustful lungings of the massesTrundling home perambulators,Striving to increase the nation –Indiscriminate copulators.is a representative sample – ‘Joe’ was to remain all her life a creature of action and not words.Following the Armistice and a stint driving lorries for the British forces in ...”

“... of Christ’s life Mark accompanied the group and suggests that the Last Supper was held in the home of a close relative. I have used the word ‘group’ because I was constantly reminded of the Rolling Stones. There is an emphasis on the problems the leader of the band has in evading his fans. At the beginning of his book Mr McCowen casts doubt on the ...”

“... Murray, a 21-year-old undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, who’s written a biography of Lord Alfred Douglas. Tina Brown flew all the way from New York to meet young Douglas (Murray not Alfred) before buying the US rights to the book. It’s been embargoed till 15 June, but presumably it’s all right to reveal that Murray thinks ‘Bosie’ and his ...”

“... in reference to Number 45 of John Wilkes’s Radical paper the North Briton, which attacked Lord Bute’s ministry as ‘the foul dregs of power, the tools of corruption and despotism’. The issue was ordered to be burned, with the usual consequence that everybody heard about it. Benjamin Franklin, travelling from London to Winchester in 1768, remarked ...”

“... is, of course, as a collection, international) is a little confusing. They would be more at home alongside the 19th-century pictures in (or once in) the British national collection at the Tate. The Berlin Nationalgalerie, which opened in 1876, had, like the Tate (but much earlier), a remit to collect and display new native work. Like the Tate, it became ...”

“... be much future in a religion that changed bread and ginger ale into the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. One of the purposes of literature, as Joyce made clear, is to put religion in its place. Joyce’s​ finding Catholic ritual amusing and Woolf’s contempt for Christians are easy to follow and fathom. Having rejected religious faith, they got ...”

“... of Northumberland. Andrew’s mother, Lady Catherine, born in 1781 in Dresden, was the daughter of Lord Claverton, who had retired to Redmond Manor (now the property of an Arab magnate), some seventy miles from Marbot Hall, after a lifetime spent in the diplomatic service in Germany, the Low Countries and Italy. The main influence on the boy came from the ...”

“... poems are about being a Lowell, or rather, more specifically, about being this Lowell. Only in the home of democracy, probably, could the personality of the poet as aristocrat be asserted today in this fashion. It is an irony which strikes deeper with each rereading, and the realisation of it comes each time to seem more important to the status and success of ...”

“... and in peril in an increasingly Whig and Protestant state. There is the case of the future Lord Baltimore and the daughter of Lord Lichfield in Broken Lives, ‘a Catholic marriage on both sides’ and, in Uncertain Unions, the premarital struggles of the daughter of the Tory, possibly Jacobite, 2nd Duke of ...”