“... full the letter in English that in 1393 his faithful squire John Sampson sent to his English agent Thomas Coggeshall, announcing that his master was planning to return, with Donnina, to England, ‘unless he die before his coming home’. The letter, which serves in effect as a nuncupative will, at the same time conveys Hawkwood’s instructions for the sale ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... had been my parents’ landlord in New York City in the 1970s. Another of his tenants was Thomas Pynchon, who wrote some of Gravity’s Rainbow at 161 Charles Lane in the West Village. Their association was complicated by Pynchon’s fear of Harrison’s feral cat Martha, who stalked his rooms and disrupted his concentration with her demonic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from the Middle Ages raises some provocative questions about historical figures. Was Thomas Aquinas truly a glutton, or was he so absorbed in thought that he ate whatever was set before him, without noticing how much? Did Catherine of Siena really think of her notorious (and fatal) anorexia as a ‘philosophy of wellness’? Could Bernard of ...”

“... of a needle trapped in the final groove of a record. Their dark outlook isn’t like that of Thomas Bernhard, whose cynicism is driven by a kind of grim joy, nor do they have the animated interiority of Lynne Tillman or Lydia Davis, whose currents of thought sweep up the reader and carry them along. Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation are exercises ...”

“... and would like something to counterbalance this. I would like to read about St Francis and St Thomas Aquinas,’ he wrote in his early twenties. He showed an early talent for art, and was sent to the Slade through the benevolence of a local Lady Bountiful. He emerged from it in 1912, an almost dwarfish figure a couple of inches over five feet and weighing ...”

“... commonplace books to place him in a ‘West Riding enlightenment’ based on the ideas of Thomas Nettleton in Treatise on Virtue and Happiness (1736). The richness of the source material made it possible for Steedman to achieve great depth of characterisation, both of the people and of their environment. Labours Lost, a study of domestic servants, who ...”

“... national security. They even keep secrets from one another. Powers tells how a senior CIA officer, William Harvey, gave a Mafia hoodlum called John Roselli four poison pills for Castro. ‘He [Harvey] had run the operation with extreme security: none of the men who even worked for him on Task Force W [the Castro assassination department] knew what he was up to ...”

“... wholly physical or material in nature.’ Strawson’s argument builds on arguments made famous by Thomas Nagel. According to Nagel, no amount of purely physical information about what goes on in a creature’s brain (he used a bat as his example) can tell us ‘what it is like’ to be that creature. In this sense, objective physical science radically omits ...”

“... of the strengths and failings popularly associated with Victoria’s reign. In that, he resembles Thomas Arnold, a year his junior: the first of Strachey’s ‘eminent Victorians’, he actually died less than five years into the Queen’s reign. But whereas Arnold was a liberal Anglican of passionate faith, Grote’s spiritual home is among the ...”