“... interest of everyone from the era’s chief ghost-hunter, Joseph Glanvill, to Christopher Wren and Charles II. A Hampshire landowner called John Mompesson imprisoned William Drury, a busker and vagrant, and confiscated his drum. Mompesson’s house was then beset by terrible knockings from inside and out. Beds shook, heavy objects were thrown about, children ...”

“... experimenting with in his free time. Ehrich, by now better known as Harry Houdini, the Handcuff King, would say years later that the released prisoner was ‘the only person in the world beside my wife who knows how I open locks’. If he’d been concentrating, he could have had quite a career. As Ehrich liked to remind the inhabitants of Appleton, his ...”

“... Leo then tells the story of a bird that could live either on land or under the water. When the king of the birds demands taxes from him, the bird professes himself to be a creature of the water and retreats there. But when the king of the fishes, in turn, demands taxes, the bird declares that he belongs to the land. Leo ...”

“... it officially was) practised religious toleration. When Henri duc d’Anjou was elected king in January 1573, only months after tens of thousands of Protestants had been massacred in his native France, he was forced to submit to a resolution which ran: Since there is in our Commonwealth no little disagreement on the subject of religion, in order to ...”

“... giving birth to evolution.’ ‘When a man desires ardently to know the truth,’ the pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce wrote at the close of the 19th century, ‘his first effort will be to imagine what that truth can be … It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of ...”

“... to Henry James. Meanwhile, Marlowe’s breakthrough blockbuster and its author were forgotten, as Charles Saunders’s indignant claim for the originality of his own play Tamerlane the Great (1681) makes clear:I never heard of any Play on the same Subject, untill my own was Acted, neither have I since seen it, though it hath been told me, there is a Cock-Pit ...”

“... a provocatively Catholicising polemical gesture by the campaigning editors, emboldened by Charles I’s direct patronage of the project. Here, with a vengeance, was the High Church Andrewes, father of Laudianism and of later Anglo-Catholicism. Puritans, unwilling to relinquish possession of the most famous preacher of the age, but constrained by royal ...”

“... century. Both fled their home cities as children to escape racial violence: Gordon, the Robert Charles riots of 1900, in which a mob of white Southerners murdered dozens after an African American man shot a police officer who had asked what he was doing in a mainly white neighbourhood; Croll, the Odessa pogrom of 1905, in which more than four hundred Jews ...”

“... English have their houses made of sticks and dirt but they fare commonly so well as the king.’ This was possibly a traveller’s tale swelled by English patriotism, but in good times it contained some truth, and that it could be uttered and believed in its day is itself significant. Dr Palliser shows that one reason for low taxation was ...”

“... a Catholic martyr because he died opposing Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and the King’s robbery from the Pope of the leadership of the English Church. But he is also seen as a lawyer-layman caught in the mesh of presumptuous ecclesiology, an English Cicero of the pre-Reformation who nobly gave his head to forces beyond his control. Most ...”

“... the death of Louis? Couldn’t he have intervened to arrest the chain of events that had led the king inexorably to the guillotine? In the summer of 1792, with the Austrian and Prussian armies massing on the borders of France, threatening to invade in order to restore Louis to all the ‘legitimate authority’ he had exercised before the Revolution, the ...”

“... elaborately presented. In the great tournament ordered by Henry VIII in 1511, for example, the king and three companions, presenting themselves as ‘les quater Chivalers de la forrest salvigne’, emerged from an elaborate artificial wood, consisting of ‘12 hawthorns, 12 oaks, 12 maples, 10 birches, 16 dozen fern roots and branches, 60 broom stalks, and ...”

“... had unexpected former careers: one was an ex-pickpocket, and one a highwayman who had turned king’s evidence to save his neck. Others came from thoroughly peaceable trades: a hatter, a pastry-cook, a button-maker, a saddler and a shoemaker all signed up in the course of the next few decades. The court at Bow Street was on the ground floor of the ...”

“... Smith, sometimes he was Stewart, and sometimes he was Preston, but the most telling of the aliases Charles Stewart Parnell used to conduct the liaison with Mrs O’shea that eventually destroyed him was undoubtedly ‘Mr Fox’. Revealed by the divorce proceedings of November 1890, which, in wrecking his alliance with Gladstonian Liberalism, cost him his ...”

“... into Van Gogh, Corot into Pissarro, Constable into Monet – and Monet into Jackson Pollock. Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner in Romanticism and Realism, a book based on articles written in the course of recent years for the New York Review of Books, are anxious to defend the idea of a ‘modern tradition’ and argue that Romantics, Realists and ...”