“... and details of the figure match the monk’s story, including the fully shaven head that is the mark of a lay brother rather than a tonsured initiate. We know that both Charles V and Philip II employed a clockmaker, the Italian-Spanish engineer Juanelo Turriano, who is said to have built other automata. Turriano was by all accounts a technical genius. The ...”

“... in a neighbourly way, without having such meetings?’ Desperately wheedling sounds nearer the mark. Later on, after Bunyan had been jailed, it is perfectly clear that he was repeatedly let out, allowed to go to London, given facilities for writing. When they found he had gone to London, Bunyan reports, his enemies were so angry ‘they had almost cast my ...”

“... than it makes for 20th-century New Yorkers to hanker after being ruled by King Arthur and his knights. Stone’s history is a good deal like Mark Twain’s, and hardly the worse for it either. Still, historical, textual, and interpretative questions will creep in. Did Socrates hanker after a return to aristocratic or ...”

“... riding masters, horsebreakers and common or garden grooms. In the same way that the horse left its mark on the titles of the aristocracy of Europe, the Ritters, Cabelleros and Chevaliers, so it marked the surnames of the ordinary man: the Smiths, Grooms, Carters, Wheelers, Wainwrights, Cartwrights, Jaggers, Packers and Sadlers.The rise of the steam engine ...”

“... the Channel. French became the language of the new social elite, the court, the barons and the knights among whom the newly conquered country was divided up. Anyone with ambitions for a secular or religious career needed to speak French, as did the increasing number of merchants involved in trade with the Continent, and it rapidly established itself as ...”

“... or play music for celebratory dances, such as the one that took place at St Paul’s Cathedral to mark the birth in 1312 of the future Edward III. There were other, highly specific functions. Records show that there was a common practice of minstrels performing in front of images of the Virgin in church, sometimes while nobles were giving alms. The king’s ...”

“... was pullulating with objects and capacities and persons who lacked any name or distinguishing mark. It was a period when the will and determination to exist, to leave a trace ... was not wholly used up.’ Six years later, Calvino published a collection of stories about an even more fluid time. The 12 Cosmicomics take, for their modest theme, nothing more ...”

“... trilogy lingers. It reads in part like a parody of Dan Brown-type conspiracy novels, with their Knights Templar, Illuminati, Opus Dei et al. But here the narrative comes from inside the cult, whose language gradually takes over: by the end of Bro, we have become inured to the Brotherhood’s habit of calling ordinary humans ‘husks’ or ‘meat ...”

“... through the attainment of particular distinctions: MPs, KCs, senior diplomats, dames and knights, university vice-chancellors, national newspaper editors, FRSs and FBAs. The rest are determined by criteria not made public. A few professions, such as my own, have become too commonplace to matter: Oxbridge professors stopped being listed automatically ...”

“... until lately, made its fundamental importance difficult to recognise. Not until the appearance of Mark Thornton Burnett’s study, Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama, barely a decade ago, did its place in early modern culture seem worth exploring. Even Burnett’s study was limited by its concentration on the humbler categories of servant, on ...”

“... special subject in Schools was Richard II so I had been to McFarlane’s lectures on the Lollard Knights; I also had a copy of some notes on his 1953 Ford Lectures that was passed down from year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David Marquand, who was at Magdalen and who told me how he had been scared ...”

“... familiar with a subject have missed, but where a highly complex topic, such as the history of the Knights Templar or of Christian origins, is got up for a specific purpose, with the research carried out, as it largely must be, at second hand, it is none too easy to get its feel and setting, and the risk of making major blunders increases with the anxiety to ...”

“... this novel, surely a librarian’s worst nightmare (does each fascicule need its own shelf-mark?) as ‘a physical, tangible metaphor for randomness and the nature of cancer’. Johnson’s critical pronouncements can make his fiction sound as though it must be pretentious tripe. It isn’t. The Unfortunates captures exactly the wreckage of ...”

“... the third and fourth centuries represented, as Fleming puts it, Britain’s ‘high-water mark of romanitas’. There were villas in every city and many small towns, some of them enormous and luxurious, like the one at Woodchester near Stroud, with its 8500 square-foot principal room. Some were no doubt occupied by Roman officials, but the majority ...”

“... and likes, all of whom he assumes are repelled by his deformity. Shardlake’s first sidekick, Mark Poer, is twittish, something of a Lord Percy to his Blackadder, but represents both the son he’ll never have and a masculine ideal he can’t measure up to. Poer’s face is smooth where Shardlake’s is angular, his hair cropped where Shardlake’s is ...”