“... were few wealthy abbeys left to seize; the very last was Waltham Abbey, on 23 March 1540, where Thomas Tallis was employed.Tallis, who was then about 35, had been at Dover Priory when it met a similar fate five years earlier. He left Waltham Abbey with forty shillings, twenty in ‘wages’ and twenty in ‘rewards’; and took with him at least one ...”

“... required to draw a map of old Palestine, ‘indicating the position of the Jewish tribes’. Thomas Jervis’s map of the Crimean peninsula Biblical Palestine loomed large in the teaching of geography for generations of British children: I can remember drawing maps of it at Sunday school in the 1960s, to accompany my own newspaper supplement featuring ...”

“... and corrupt electoral system prior to 1832 may have encouraged some Scottish proconsuls like Thomas Maitland, Governor of Malta and the Ionian Islands, to take a particularly dim and manipulative view of colonial assemblies. Scotland’s churches produced distinctive forms of missionary activity, while the fact that few Scottish, as compared with English ...”

“... of a strength than a weakness. It absolved her from ever being wrong.’ She was born Georgina Thomas, in the year of Queen Victoria’s succession, to parents who were howling snobs. Morgan Thomas, her father, who had failed to win Coventry for the Tories, made no secret that he intended to match her with a suitor worth ...”

“... books hug the East Coast strip bounded by Princeton in the south (where she earned her PhD under Thomas Nagel) and Boston in the north. She has what Hobbes called libido sciendi. She’s absorbed by the relation between emotion and intellect, and in particular by genius. The off-chart mathematician Noam Himmel opens her first novel, The Mind-Body ...”

“... or Soviet-style Marxism. Some of the most prominent social planners of those years, such as William Beveridge and Barbara Wootton in Britain, Pierre Laroque and Francis Netter in France, together with many campaigners for a united or federal postwar Europe, were heirs and exemplars of the positivist tradition of social, political and legal thought. Two ...”

“... of Psalm 20, is the oldest surviving version of any psalm. Among the more recent exhibits was Thomas More’s psalter, printed in Paris in 1522, with prayers written in the margins in Latin and English while he was in the Tower of London awaiting execution.The Book of Psalms provided an impetus for the discussion of theological and philosophical ...”

“... work to which Collinson supplies both a corrective interpretation and a sociological dimension – William Haller unblushingly declared himself concerned less ‘with the links that connect Puritanism with the past than with the ways which Puritanism marked out for the future’. By ‘the future’, Haller meant the Puritan Revolution. Collinson is interested ...”

“... William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, recorded his last ever broadcast from the temporary offices of the German Radio Corporation, in Hamburg, on the day Hitler shot himself. British troops were on the point of entering the city and Joyce and his colleagues had raided the cellars of the Funkhaus, drinking everything they could find ...”

“... nor was there any mention of the two actors, the American Edwin Forrest and the Englishman William Charles Macready, whose long-smouldering rivalry as to whose was the greatest Macbeth of the age had culminated in clashes between a 15,000-strong mob and a detachment of the National Guard. Nowadays the neighbourhood hardly looks like the front line in ...”

“... began to give way to interiority: it became a psychic injury, a ‘thorn in the spirit’, as William James put it, an injury done not to the body but to the mind by violence, or by any unspeakable or unassimilable experience. In the 19th century and much of the 20th these mental wounds were understood to be represented in the body by such symptoms as ...”

“... bêtise, niaiserie, démence’. Two important Enlightenment systematists, R.A. Vogel and William Cullen, made a different decision: in their systems paranoia was enlarged by making it part of the vesaniae, which included mania and melancholia; in Cullen’s system, a disorder of the class vesaniae would involve a lesion of the faculty of ...”

“... Landor), but cites instead David Lynch, Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, Marcel Duchamp, William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, Hugo Ball, Geoff Dyer, Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis.Lamb deserves​ much better than this. He deserves, most of all, an account that makes you want to read him. His prose only ...”

“... he was 17, Britten went to church in Lowestoft and heard ‘quite a fine sermon’ by the Rev. Thomas Henry Stanley, who was standing in for the incumbent, the Rev. William Reeve. Reeve was away – in case you care, he was in Blankenberghe, Belgium. On August Bank Holiday in that year Britten went to see a show with ...”

“... and, moreover, are segmented, just as vertebrates are, and tunicate larvae are not. Then, in 1886, William Bateson studied the development of a large mud-dwelling worm, quite unrelated to annelids, named Balanoglossus, and showed that it, too, had pharyngeal gill slits, a dorsal nerve cord and possibly even a notochord – could this be the ancestor of the ...”