“... most likely to have commissioned them is the Howard matriarch Katherine Knyvett, second wife of Thomas Howard, 1st earl of Suffolk. Larkin painted Katherine wearing a red farthingale dress with gold embroidery and a ruff so large her head looks as if it were served up on a plate like John the Baptist’s.A portrait of Katherine’s nephew Richard Sackville ...”

“... The double centenary​ in 2012 of the publication of Kafka’s The Judgment and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice was marked only, to my knowledge, by a single conference, in California. Yet these two stories represented crucial breakthroughs for writers who came to dominate the German literature of the age. Both experienced a creative liberation thanks to forces seemingly beyond the conscious efforts that were getting them nowhere – in old-fashioned terms, thanks to inspiration ...”

“... turkeys, hawks and falcons. In 1525, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo sent the emperor ‘thirty or more parrots’, most of which ‘could speak very well’. They didn’t just send birds: in 1528, Hernán Cortés arranged the delivery of a jaguar who ‘is very tame and moves freely about the house and eats at the table what he is given’. Cortés thought ...”

“... Melamed, who died well before his grandson’s – our author’s – birth, has something of the Thomas Hardy character about him: ‘existlessness’ is his lot. He survives in a picture, a travel document, an address book, a case for a pair of glasses and the glasses themselves, through which Jacobson sees the world as blurred and vertiginous. ‘So this ...”

“... There will be many more years –and many more volumes – before the Carlyles’ Collected Letters are brought to completion. Twenty-two more years of Jane Carlyle’s long, witty, sharp, self-dramatising yet oddly attractive litanies about the obstinacy of servants, her husband’s indifference to her, and the annoyances of her lot as a ‘Lion’s wife’ obliged to ‘do the bores’ who come to view the lion himself ...”

“... one of the Reich’s lattermost days, we find Goebbels again settling down at bedtime with ‘Thomas Carlyle’s book’ drowning out the rumble of Soviet artillery and the RAF’s Mosquito raids. This is not an endorsement which brings a prophet honour in his own country. But Carlyle’s reputation was sunk long before the Nazis took him along to their ...”

“... 17th-century France. The common causes of sickness and death in advanced societies are therefore more accurately regarded as diseases associated with industrialisation. Although the issues discussed in the two books are often overlaid by financial, political and professional considerations, they are arguably as fundamental as those that arise in the current ...”

“... carried on. But listen to this: Upon Sunday the 18th and 25th days of this instant month of July, Thomas Odam with a white sheet upon his uppermost garment, and a white wand in his hand, shall come into the parish church at Charlton at the beginning of the forenoon service and stand forth in the middle space before the pulpit during the whole time of divine ...”

“... and flowers and Alfred’s headstone has an ornate wire frame fixed behind it, covered with more flowers. Amelia and Albert were the only mourners at Alfred’s funeral on 30 January 1939. According to the Paris correspondent of the Times, those at Yeats’s graveside included ‘Mrs Yeats, Mr Dermod O’Brien, the President of the Royal Hibernian ...”

“... nation’ – a curiously radical and Republican statement, a prefiguration of Robespierre’s more celebrated Jacobinical cri de coeur of 1794, ‘Je hais le peuple anglais.’ Born in 1706 to a family of recently immigrated Bostonian tallow chandlers, Franklin did not, of course, attend Massachusett’s premier instructional seminary, Harvard ...”

“... in your pocket, when you may as it were conferre and heare them talke togither when you will? Nay more, drinke togither: yea, and that which is a further matter; utter their minds, chuse Husbands, and censure Complections; and all this in a quiet and friendly sort, betweene themselves and the pinte-pot. Samuel​ Rowlands’s Tis Merrie When Gossips Meete ...”

“... as any other old Etonian from Somersetshire. The text of the leaflet is reprinted in Hugh Thomas’s biography of Strachey published twenty years ago. Thomas told us much more about Strachey the man (cricket, tennis, adoring family, etc) than about Strachey the socialist. This is ...”

“... her husband’s previous wife; a young man looking for something he can’t quite name, something more than a meeting with God, something beyond enlightenment; a ‘badu’, a wild man from the deserts to the south, who the others think is mad but turns out instead to be deaf. Two of the seven are there not by choice: a merchant who was abandoned by the rest ...”

“... Thus the characters in the poem behave like 15th-century knights and often the background is more Edinburgh and the grey North Sea than the colourful panoply of the Mediterranean ... ’ Saint Gregory ‘forbiddis ws to translate word efter word,’ said Douglas. Who were these ‘many other translators of his day’? Douglas’s vernacular translation ...”

“... have done with life.’ This is sometimes taken to mean that he regrets the choice he made; but more than that, he’s saying that once you’re dead, it doesn’t make any difference. Not that the living will ever really believe it; we still want Achilles. And so we get the story of his life: ‘But first, a quickening.’ Achilles is the son of Thetis, a ...”