“... to bring them back into fashion. The five complete survivors, and their Latin cousin, Apollonius King of Tyre, paint with the same brush; their colourful conventions are thrown into relief by the two Roman geniuses who parody and transcend them, Petronius and Apuleius. (New translations of the whole Greek corpus now come in a bumper volume, Collected Ancient ...”

“... without representation’ became a political demand for liberty, changed everything. Major John Cartwright (who was later to advise the Manchester radicals) and Thomas Paine were influenced by the American programme in their arguments for domestic reform, Take Your Choice! and Common Sense. Yet it was the French Revolution that made the working classes ...”

“... and one about a country. The people are Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, Ayatollah Khomeini and Pope John Paul II. The place is Afghanistan. The year 1979 mattered to all of them. It was the year Thatcher won her first general election. The year Deng embarked on the economic reforms that would transform China. The year the Iranian Revolution swept Khomeini to ...”

“... she was one of four English writers selected: Shakespeare did not make the cut. And then there are John Shepery, Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, who had the brilliant idea of a poem by a man responding to female accusations from the Heroides; Sir Thomas Chaloner, ambassador to Spain, who wrote a ten-book poem on statecraft dedicated to Lord Burghley, De ...”

“... retaining it and FIFA be damned – what is this about ‘Englishness’? It is this question that John Lucas sets himself to answer, in considering the poetry of two centuries. He has one immediate cultural handicap: he cannot refrain from sniping at his own side (the English), as if to provide credentials of fairness. But what he says often seems more ...”

“... naming of parts; to Dickinson, the blow of phrase upon phrase, their cause as chancy as their end. John Bayley, the most English of critics, looks for truth by resorting to foreign parts of it. Or by subjecting home truths to the stress of foreignness. Russia and the USA are his main resorts, the one for fulfilment, the other for provocation. But his criticism ...”

“... and Edmond Halley, those grandees of the Royal Society, and on the other the Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed, the doyen of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Johns levels the same complaint against historians of science as against Eisenstein: that they take the subject ‘outside history’ and miss the struggles, practical as well as ...”

“... ghost-hunter, Joseph Glanvill, to Christopher Wren and Charles II. A Hampshire landowner called John Mompesson imprisoned William Drury, a busker and vagrant, and confiscated his drum. Mompesson’s house was then beset by terrible knockings from inside and out. Beds shook, heavy objects were thrown about, children were lifted up in the air. Most of all, a ...”

“... hard and keen like a hunting animal.’ Here Leo’s daimon is adapting and echoing the words of John Pory, who in 1600 published an English translation of the historical Leo’s La Descrittione dell’ Africa: ‘How many desolate cold mountains and huge drie, and barren deserts passed he? How often was he in hazard to have been captived, or to have had his ...”

“... it officially was) practised religious toleration. When Henri duc d’Anjou was elected king in January 1573, only months after tens of thousands of Protestants had been massacred in his native France, he was forced to submit to a resolution which ran: Since there is in our Commonwealth no little disagreement on the subject of religion, in order to ...”

“... they have encountered over the centuries in combining the roles of temporal and spiritual leader, king and priest – ‘two powers in one body’, as an anonymous 17th-century writer once put it. As a temporal ruler Alexander VII controlled only a mini-state with about a million inhabitants, about a twentieth of the size of the France of Louis XIV. There was ...”

“... troops which an adaptive academic might best give, the sort of thing which in our own time Sir John Hackett would fully understand. It has not been unknown in great soldiers; neither was Lawrence’s other quality, a dishevelled contempt for punctilio and natty dress; Oliver Cromwell, no less, was referred to in awe as ‘that sloven’. Lawrence, for all ...”

“... by a statement of intent. The essays concentrate on Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, King Lear and The Tempest. Greenblatt’s method is to juxtapose famous ‘literary’ texts with lesser-known, ‘non-literary’ texts, such as Jacques Duval’s Des Hermaphrodits (1603), Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (also ...”

“... trope.Then several things happened. The owner of Books and Bookmen, an operator by the name of John Dosse, took the opportunity of emulating the Masada faction and the Goebbelses, and committed suicide himself. I received a moist letter from the editor of the magazine, written in the tone of ‘I hope you’re satisfied now.’ I was accused in print, by ...”

“... the Queen of Romania, Queen Victoria’s third son, the Duke of Connaught, and less frequently King Edward VII. Rose quotes one of Nancy’s ‘most celebrated bons mots’: when invited by the King to play bridge, she is said to have refrained with the claim: ‘Why I don’t even know the difference between a ...”