“... warrior who would have redeemed Britain’s honour. ‘Prince Henry on Horseback’ by Robert Peake the Elder (c.1606-08). The National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition (until 13 January), which is scholarly in detail and spectacular to view, is an attempt to rediscover the truth behind the later myths. What it largely reveals is an earlier set of ...”

“... blue and gold filigree Anglo-Saxon brooch, recovered from the Kingston Down barrow in 1771 by the young Henry Faussett under the directions of his antiquarian father, the Rev. Bryan, who was confined to his carriage by gout, and a ‘jousting cheque’ or scorecard from the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Down the centre of the first gallery runs an immense ...”

“... Rodchenko must have been crouching when, in 1930, he made close-up, foreshortened portraits of young Pioneers. In the repertory of poses photographers have invented or borrowed, heads seen from below against the sky tend to stand for things like ‘hope’, ‘striving’ and ‘looking to a new horizon’. Photographs taken from above, on the other ...”

“... Given​ how many of those who worked closely with Robert Maxwell wrote a book about him, it’s interesting that so many facts about him remain unclear. Did he face a death sentence at the age of sixteen? Was he in the French Foreign Legion? In the months before his death, in 1991, was he really being investigated for a war crime? Did MI6 finance his first business in order to recruit Soviet scientists? Was he a KGB asset? Did he have a financial relationship with Jeffrey Epstein? ‘He has done more for Israel than can be said here today,’ Yitzhak Shamir said at his funeral ...”

“... Rites and In between the Sheets, published by the time he was thirty; one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists at 35; Booker winner at fifty. Atonement (2001) sold two million copies; by the time McEwan was sixty it had become an Oscar-winning movie starring Keira Knightley and Saoirse Ronan. It’s only natural for a man in his seventies who has ...”

“... Steve Bannon​ doesn’t like him. Before the conclave, he named Cardinal Robert Prevost as ‘one of the dark horses’ to become the next pope. ‘Unfortunately, he’s one of the most progressive,’ Bannon added. It is unlikely that Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, who had objected to Pope Francis and wants a return to a more traditional Catholicism, has much time for him either ...”

“... novel. A dissatisfied schoolmaster in Salisbury, he was burdened by several enemies of promise: a young family, a chronic drinking problem and an often paralysing sense of his own inadequacy. The three books he’d previously written remained unpublished. ‘I was tired of the recurrent thud as returned manuscripts fell on the mat in the morning,’ he later ...”

“... buried grandfather Anthony. In the same year Sarah’s elder sister Martha married a well-to-do young solicitor, Robert Roscoe, who had been one of their first lodgers at Southampton Buildings. This was an excellent match from the Walkers’ point of view, one they were no doubt keen to repeat for Sarah, now in her late ...”

“... a view of diverting the tedium of a ship at anchor’, four passengers, among them a young man called Munro, went ashore to hunt deer on Saugor Island. Another member of the party, Captain Henry Conran, described what followed in a letter to a friend: About half past three we sat down on the edge of the jungle, to eat some cold meat sent us from ...”

“... unusual layout and typography, and for his close association with older poets, especially with Robert Lowell (he co-edited Lowell’s posthumous Collected Poems). Bidart and his poems indeed have all these qualities, but they are not the best reasons to read his poetry. That poetry – especially in his last few books – deserves to be known for the ...”

“... many gender nonconformists, some of the disabled and the ailing, many of the very old and the very young, and anyone else who is physically alive but civically lessened. He calls it an inhumanity, all too human, that we regularly visit on our own kind.First in his typology are people who simply vanish. Right away Heller-Roazen demonstrates his range, citing ...”

“... the circulation had fallen from 1.5m to 650,000 copies. After the print unions refused to discuss Robert Maxwell’s offer for the paper, Murdoch stepped in. ‘I am constantly amazed at the ease with which I entered British newspapers,’ he later said. Stick it up your punter! tells that story, and the story of what happened afterwards: a story which social ...”

“... not just as hero but as a kind of secular saint. Recalling the mild furore a few years ago over Robert Gittings’s life of Hardy, with its intimations that the great advocate of loving-kindness could be snobbish and mean-spirited, severe with his servants and a brute to his wife, one is bound to reflect that even today the faith is not quite ...”

“... When the King’s printer Robert Barker produced a new edition of the King James Bible in 1631, he overlooked three letters from the seventh commandment, producing the startling injunction: ‘Thou shalt commit adultery.’ Barker was fined £300, and spent the rest of his life in debtors’ prison, even while his name remained on imprints ...”

“... Nonetheless, he has unearthed some corroborating evidence – including a steamy letter to another young favourite, apparently written while Vaughan was invigilating a school exam – and concludes that the story is broadly true. But this characteristic piece of English hypocrisy is only one element in Tyerman’s demythologising of the school’s ‘greatest ...”