“... resolving these feelings. One is the dedication: ‘To the memory of my friend Squadron Leader Ian Cross, DFC and those 49 of his fellow prisoners who were shot with him by Hitler’s orders on recapture after escaping from Stalag Luft III in 1944.’ The reader cannot remain unmoved by this and it is part of the experience of reading the book. It is difficult ...”

“... In 1992, just before Andronikos’s death, the Greek government awarded him the Great Cross of the Order of the Phoenix, its highest non-military honour, and a government official praised him for ‘arming the quiver of Hellenism’ against those who sought to distort or falsify Greek history. The implication was clear. Since the tombs lay well ...”

“... you,’ he said, ‘when it fires it’s as if a horse has kicked you back from the grave.’ Robin Robertson, the poet and editor, was born with a heart in which one of the valves – the aortic valve – was composed of only two cusps instead of the usual three. The aortic valve prevents backflow from the aorta into the principal ventricle of the ...”

“... of Crécy in 1346. The slightly longer answer would include the English victory at Neville’s Cross the same year, which ended with King David II of Scotland a prisoner in the Tower, to be joined ten years later, after Poitiers, by King John II of France. Some might argue – and professional historians no doubt prefer multi-factored answers – that the ...”

“... now in the SNP – took Govan from Labour in a by-election, and the party flung itself into the cross-party Constitutional Convention to establish a framework for a Scottish Parliament. This new determination was the product of a metamorphosis in the party’s social and intellectual profile, which reflected deeper changes across Scotland. Labour’s ...”

“... as like as not. We know what they did: rape and pillage. Along with the Crusaders, King Arthur and Robin Hood, they form a major part of our medieval imaginary. For fifty years now specialists in Viking studies have been trying to convince us, without much success, that ‘Viking’ is a job description, not an ethnic category, that behind the generic figure ...”

“... has sunk so catastrophically over the past five years is the electronic efficiency of libraries in cross-cataloguing and inter-library loan. A battle is looming between the publishing and library industries. Having been extorted for some ten million volumes over the years publishers will look very coldly on the BL’s begging bowl. And, quite rightly, they ...”

“... switched, at the height of his career, to an instrument made in Paris by Raoux. In this act of cross-fertilisation, he anticipated Dennis Brain – perhaps the greatest player of our century – who in mid-career abandoned the narrow-bore Raoux horn on which he had been trained to take up a German instrument.The historical part of Barry Tuckwell’s book ...”

“... black hair bobbed short, a thin, determined little mouth’. When she was a baby, her big brother Robin was murdered, hanged from the tree in the front yard on Mother’s Day. The culprit has never been found. It’s a bizarre crime: this is not how children get killed. But the details of his death are unimportant; what matters is the fact of it. The effect ...”

“... naturalists’ when it was exhibited at Windsor.) There were also some alarming attempts at cross-breeding. In 1773, Lord Robert Clive was determined that his zebra mare should mate with an ass. The zebra ‘shewed great disgust’ but Clive persevered: the ass was painted with stripes, ‘whereupon she accepted him’. (The mule that resulted from this ...”

“... records the happy exhortation: ‘Let us unite in Christ’s Faith and the victory of the Holy Cross, for, God willing, today we shall all be made rich.’ (Some were, though one feels that most were not.) The Crusading generals quarrelled interminably and destructively among themselves, with results that nearly scuppered the First Crusade and did scupper ...”

“... mid-Fifties I was present at a similar explosion of black humour. In the company of a girl called Robin Banks I visited the Magrittes, who had quite recently moved to the Rue des Mimosas – an indication that at last René was beginning to prosper. Perhaps because Robin was very pretty, perhaps because Magritte was amused ...”

“... Robin Fleming’s history is Volume II in the Penguin History of Britain, for which the general editor, David Cannadine, ‘laid down three inviolable rules’: no footnotes, no historiography (that is, no discussion of the ebb and flow of historical opinion), and make it accessible to everyone, general readers, students and professional historians alike (in other words, don’t just write for the trade ...”

“... allusion, a sort of political bible with Sir Richard Scott in the role of the Yahweh/ Saviour and Robin Cook and Ian Lang fighting it out to play St Paul. In fact, the occasional double negative aside (these alone have been enough to drive our illiterate media into hysterical denunciations of prolixity), the Report is a model of clarity. Its narrative is ...”

“... Like relics of the True Cross, there are said to be enough splinters to make an orchard from the mulberry tree planted by Shakespeare in his garden at New Place. The Shakespeare canon has excited nearly as much passion for tangible facts, however marginal to the true faith, as Holy Writ. Bits of venerated mulberry scattered around the world of believers are a salutary reminder that our passion for tangibility evokes more than just that irritable reaching after fact and reason that Keats declared to be the antithesis of Shakespeare ...”