“... Julie Andrews kind of nun, who might just want to rip off the wimple and sing. Stephen Burt and David Mikics’s collection of 100 sonnets through the ages is heavily weighted towards poems from the 20th and 21st centuries, and also towards some occasionally groan-worthy American poems – though perhaps hearts less jaded than mine leap up at Emma ...”

“... other than human life. There’s also a masterly volume of summary and analysis by the editor, David Fisher, who dislikes paragraphs and believes in calling a bastard a bastard. Inevitably, such an exhaustive work of reference answers questions nobody is ever likely to ask. As you leaf through the 6000 double-columned pages you are sometimes overwhelmed by ...”

“... Hazan’s book is thick with quotations from Balzac’s novels and stories. The translator, David Fernbach, had to decide how to handle them: translate them himself, or seek out existing versions? Understandably, he adopted the latter course, but in some cases he chooses Katherine Prescott Wormeley’s translations from the late 19th century, which are ...”

“... deal that needed explaining. Some, like the Italian interviewer, have dwelt on the appeal of the David-and-Goliath conflict between the Gauls and the Roman superpower. Or, at least, David and Goliath with a twist: Astérix doesn’t beat brute force by superior cunning and intelligence – he does it thanks to his ...”

“... liked Germany and negotiated the concordat did not mean, however, that he was a crypto-Nazi. As David Kertzer concludes in his new book, ‘Pope Pius XII was certainly not “Hitler’s Pope” … In many ways, the Nazi regime was anathema to the pope and to virtually all those around him in the Vatican. They were alarmed by the Reich’s efforts to weaken ...”

“... has a nice tracking shot through the deserted quays of the future Docklands. The TV comic Dave King, playing a corrupt detective, reprimands Hoskins. A car has been detonated outside a Hawksmoor church. ‘We can’t have bombs going off, Harold. We can’t have corpses.’ But that, unfortunately, is the price in the catalogue. Spontaneous public ...”

“... eliminated in the first ballot, leaving Denis Healey to slug it out successfully against the Demon King, Silkin saw himself in a heroic light. The wafer-thin majority for Healey, he claims, marked the start of Benn’s political decline. Certainly it paved the way for Neil Kinnock’s accession, but, six years and two general elections on, it all has the air ...”

“... were often ludicrous. In April 1921 a man was brought to court for offering to put the King in the mines ‘with his shirt off and make him do the same as the miners, and get corns on his shoulders picking coal’. In June 1926 someone got three months’ hard labour for suggesting that the police ‘might be engaged on better work’ than visiting ...”

“... was still a capital offence for Spaniards to export it. The monopoly was broken in 1723 when the King of Spain sent a gift of merinos to Sweden. Thereafter it appears to have been smuggled out of Iberia, among other countries to South Africa, from which it was exported to Australia in 1797, and to the United States, where it became established in the ...”

“... crossed Newfoundland, 33 hours before he landed in Paris. The French President decorated him; King George V received him at Buckingham Palace; President Coolidge sent a cruiser and an admiral to bring him home. In Chesapeake Bay, Mr Kennedy tells us, the cruiser was met by four destroyers, two army dirigibles and a fly-past from all three services. Ashore ...”

“... artists paid attention. After Vien, the representative artists of the new movement were Mengs and David; it was not from literature but from art that André Chénier learned the importance of the buried cities. His work was affected by this knowledge; so was the Anacharsis of the Abbé Barthélemy, published in 1788. Even women’s fashions showed the ...”

“... David Soren​ of the University of Arizona was excavating the remains of a villa just outside Lugnano in Umbria in 1992 when he uncovered a fifth-century mass grave: 47 small skeletons had been interred in layers, some pressed into large amphorae. A number of them were newborn babies. The deepest layer held only a corpse or two, but the higher levels were increasingly populated ...”

“... of hesitation or doubt. His examples include Achilles, Odysseus, Beowulf, Hildebrand, Samson and David. A hero of this type ‘so perfectly embodies the values of his culture that he experiences no doubts’: Achilles, for instance, is said to be motivated entirely by ‘archaic blood vengeance’. Yet the Iliad could be said to fit Ziolkowski’s model ...”

“... I always thought that killer fellatio was the talent which deprived the nation of its rightful King). The book is clogged with facts and suppositions taken from here, there and everywhere, and applied to humans. Anything any vagina from any species is able to do or was once capable of doing is adduced as evidence of what Blackledge calls ‘the intelligent ...”

“... story’s odder aspects is the meter reader’s own anachronistic hero fantasy: ‘In Bible days a king might ride through a field and go: That one. And she would be brought unto him. And they would duly be betrothed and if she gave birth unto a son, super, bring out the streamers, she was a keeper … What mattered was offspring and the furtherance of the ...”