“... What should we mean by ‘Reformation’? Was it a ‘paradigm shift’ of the kind proposed by Thomas Kuhn, a new set of answers to old questions, a Darwinian moment? Perhaps. For Felipe Fernández-Armesto, whose Reformation was published in 1996, it was not so much an event in the 16th century, or even an extended process, as a constant manifestation of the spirit of Christianity, at least from 1500 to the present day, ‘a continuing story, embracing the common religious experiences of Christians of different traditions worldwide ...”

“... with its 435 hand-coloured, life-size prints; or The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer printed in 1896 at William Morris’s Kelmscott Press (‘a pocket cathedral’, according to Edward Burne-Jones); or Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623), the book we call the First Folio but shouldn’t (because it ...”

“... by John Douglas as ‘the father of behavioural profiling’. Douglas is the FBI man who inspired Thomas Harris to invent the character Jack Crawford in the Hannibal Lecter novels, so he should know. This is the psychological portrait Brussel came up with of the Mad Bomber: He’s symmetrically built … neither fat nor skinny … a co-operative worker ...”

“... the academics (Nicholas Jenkins, Terry Castle, Colin McGinn, Deborah Cameron, Deborah Bowman, William Pritchard, Eric Homberger, Michael O’Neill, Rachel Buxton) and the memoirists (Karl Miller, Anthony Thwaite, Robert Conquest), though several of them can lay claim to more than one of these identities. Varied though the essays are in both approach and ...”

“... an American enthusiast, Isaac Watson Dyer, was completing his comprehensive Bibliography of Thomas Carlyle’s Writings. The multi-volume Duke-Edinburgh edition of the Collected Letters owes a great deal to the American Carlyle scholar and founding editor C.R. Sanders. The new Strouse Carlyle Edition, intended to replace the unsatisfactory and ...”

“... story. He was not dependent on a large stock of factual information, ‘On Greenhow Hill’ and ‘William the Conqueror’ would appear in any list of his best stories: yet the Yorkshire background from the first came largely from talks with his father, while the scenes in the famine area for the second were derived from his one and only rail journey through ...”

“... Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (also 1603) and Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588). He claims that a close study of Harsnett allows a re-interpretation of King Lear; that an examination of the Renaissance views of gender, sex and hermaphrodites discussed in ...”

“... whom Johnson and Boswell encountered on their 1773 tour of the Hebrides, or Pablo Fanque (a.k.a. William Darby), the acrobat and North of England circus proprietor. We still don’t know how successfully black people integrated with their local communities in towns like Leicester, Greenock and Newcastle. Gerzina writes attractively and avoids the kind of ...”

“... slumbers fall, thoughts sit, and all turn finally into lullaby. It sounds a familiar tune – William Strode could turn it out by the yard (‘Oh Lull me, lull me charming ayre,/My sences rocke with wonder sweete,/like snow on wooll thy fallings are’) – yet its delicacy is unmistakable. The chief reason critical taste has for so long been dead to the ...”

“... of national politics to address a wider audience of freer thinking international readers. Thomas More’s book of Latin epigrams was the first printed volume of classically derived Latin verse by an Englishman. It appeared first in 1518, bound with the second edition of Utopia, and it shares both the brilliance and the elusively reforming political ...”

“... committed than Jonson to the royalist or ‘court’ party. Shakespeare had at least one patron (William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke) with substantial Puritan affiliations. He himself must have been aware that the public theatres had enemies – and supporters – in both the Puritan and Anglican camps. Miss Heinemann sets out to distinguish Puritan ...”

“... in his own evidence. The idea of the Civil War as a cultural conflict is not new: it goes back to William Chillingworth, preaching before the King in 1643, and saying all the scribes and pharisees were on one side, and all the publicans and sinners on the other. What is new here is the meticulous investigation, town by town and village by village, of the ...”

“... of the mid-Forties got the Third Programme right straight off. The BBC’s Director-General, William Haley, credited himself with having created the network by two decisions. Programmes should take as long as they needed to, and not be curtailed to make way for, say, a fixed news bulletin. Schedulers were urged to be as creative as they liked with an ...”

“... A schoolboy also figures in the saga of The Book of Margery Kempe. In 1934, the son of Colonel William Butler-Bowden was playing ping-pong at their house in Derbyshire and needed a fresh ball. A search through the ball cupboard turned up ‘an entirely undisciplined clutter of smallish leather-bound books’ – including Kempe’s long-lost memoir, which ...”

“... Reading the English translations of the Psalms – reading Tyndale, Coverdale, Milton, Sidney, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Francis Bacon, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw and the inspired committee-work of the Authorised Version – one immediately notices that the biblical texts are really quite vile, and that the poets’ ‘personal agendas’ seem almost without ...”