“... porter at Corpus, when Charles Nicholl went to Cambridge to look at the portrait that is probably Christopher Marlowe. ‘He died in a tavern brawl.’ Nicholl viewed the putative Marlowe, in his opulent slashed doublet, and wondered how he could afford the outfit. He looked at his buttery bills too, and noted when the shoemaker’s son had money to ...”

“... As gravity bends light, so power bends time,’ Christopher Clark writes. The ‘temporal turn’, which has recently become fashionable among historians, looks at the interplay between an individual’s subjective experience of the world and the temporal systems that surround them. These systems are generated, on the one hand, by the infrastructure of modernity – clocks, railways, the internet – and, on the other, by ideas about stasis and change, and the past, present and future ...”

“... What is it​ we still want from Christopher Marlowe? To judge from their recent reception, it’s not his plays. Apart from Steven Pimlott’s Doctor Faustus in 2004 and Michael Boyd’s condensed Tamburlaine in 2014, there have been few outstanding Marlowe revivals in the 21st century, and his plays have been put on only in small venues ...”

“... commissions by the time he was 21. In his admirable introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Christopher Brown writes that ‘it is impossible to over-emphasise the impact of Rubens’s new style on the young Van Dyck’ – the style, that is, of the pictures Rubens painted after his return from Italy in 1608. The demand for Rubens’s work went far ...”

“... history of ideologically inspired violence: the names and causes change, the atrocities don’t. Christopher Tyerman exercises self-discipline in leaving to the last page of his text any explicit comparison between the Middle East in 1099 and in 2015. But on his very first page he introduces us to the Crusades as having their own, medieval Christian ...”

“... throughout along working life could juxtapose so simply and movingly Gloucester and Edgar in King Lear – ‘Alack I have no eyes’ ... ‘Ripeness is all’ – with a near-blind old woman’s venture down the garden and into the copse, her last flight from ...”

“... on three explosive issues almost simultaneously. There was the situation in Jordan, where King Hussein was confronting not only the rebellious Palestinian element in his own country but also the threats of his bellicose neighbours, Iraq and Syria. There was the clumsily surreptitious attempt by the Soviet Union to establish a nuclear submarine base in ...”

“... licenses. He had always defended civil rights and had entertained Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King in Chicago. Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald had performed on his TV show, which was subsequently censored in the South. Fanned by the permissive zeitgeist, the Playboy Clubs proliferated fast. Several had opened by ...”

“... elegiac fondness for the Prussian past. Pinning down what Fontane meant takes us to the heart of Christopher Clark’s lively and thoughtful book. His clear-eyed account hinges on the idea that the essence of the Prussian tradition was the absence of tradition. It is not hard to see how that quality might have impressed a 19th-century observer like ...”

“... was watched by 500 million people worldwide. Now there is The Golden Throne, the second volume in Christopher de Bellaigue’s novelesque historical trilogy about his life.The book is a carnival of depravity in five acts. We meet enslaved Christians, deceitful pirates, conniving concubines and red-faced viziers. There are spectacular battles and ad-hoc ...”

“... account of the annual Bakhtiari migration made by an American woman spy and the future creators of King Kong. The Bakhtiari tribes present, in Curzon’s words, one of the unsolved ‘riddles of history’. Fractured into numerous divisions and subdivisions, they straddle the Zagros mountains, Iran’s natural frontier to the west, and scholars are divided ...”

“... Future historians looking back at the Rodney King insurrection in South Central Los Angeles will not see (or not just see) another in the line of racial explosions which go back through Watts, the Zoot Suit riots, to the ‘Yellow Peril’ pogroms of the early 20th century. What distinguishes this particular affray by (and against) a Californian ethnic minority is that it was the first such to be entirely and comprehensively covered by television ...”

“... This in turn might go some way to explaining his psychopathic, prurient hatred for Martin Luther King. Hoover was compulsive in his taping and bugging of King’s highly virile private life, and in his campaign to use the tapes for blackmail. He officiated in the twisted plan to send ...”

“... skyscraper he planned to build on Park Avenue in New York. Bronfman, the Canadian ‘whisky king’ who owned Seagram distillers, had commissioned Pereira & Luckman to create a gleaming metal and glass edifice that resembled a decanter gift set. ‘This letter starts with one word repeated very emphatically NO NO NO NO NO,’ Lambert responded when she ...”

“... the History of the Pleas of the Crown that ‘because as the subject hath his protection from the King and his laws, so on the other side the subject is bound by his allegiance to be true and faithful to the King’. This legal contention was binding on all Britons at all times during their lives. Whether Philby was ...”