“... of Ragnar Lothbrok’, in the other camp ‘lay a youth who carried in his bosom the Psalms of David’. And he it was who charged up the hill next morning ‘like a wild boar’, in the words of Asser’s De Rebus Gestis Alfredi, to destroy the Viking jarls. Edward Freeman said flatly that Alfred was ‘the most perfect character in history’, more ...”

“... large Jewish population, and Guillem himself was a Jew, perhaps a practising one, of the house of David. (Other versions not quoted here treat him as a Christian hero who ended his days as a monk.) Attempting to explain what they see as the quite extraordinary importance attached to Merovingian descent, the connections between the Merovingians and the Grail ...”

“... draped Art Deco dryads, fishbowl lights and heavy velvet curtains. The set was screaming for a David Lynch remake of The Masque of the Red Death. Room Three, Hotel Esperance, Finistère: a beacon of hope at the end of a darkening continent. But something embedded layers deep, mephitic and beyond redemption, was present in this city. All the coded signs ...”

“... Eurosceptic ministers and former ministers, such as Iain Duncan Smith, Nigel Lawson and David Owen. Then there’s Grassroots Out, which was supposed to bring the other two lots together. But the prospectus on offer has been muddied because the spokesmen within each organisation have had different ideas. Johnson in particular changes his ideas once ...”

“... And how strange it is at this late date to see the defunct Act in Restraint of Appeals held up for our admiration. Its passage, after all, was one of the scurvier episodes in parliamentary history. In those hectic ten days at the end of March 1533, Thomas Cranmer swore his weird double oath on being installed as archbishop of Canterbury: a) to be ...”

“... true when we are trying to untangle humanity’s relationship with the natural environment,’ David Blackbourn writes, in this magnificently compelling, vivid and often pioneering book. Its subject is Germany’s struggle to subjugate its landscape, above all its waters, over the last 250 years. But its implications apply to the contemporary world, to the ...”

“... ressentiment. And yet the workplace can be seen – at least in retrospect – to have been held together by ‘a social triangle’. Bosses and workers grudgingly respected one another. Workers stuck together against the bosses, formally in trade unions and informally as friends. And in a crisis everyone worked together, to hit a deadline, prevent a ...”

“... just before the birth of the state described in Norman Rose’s ‘A Senseless, Squalid War’ and David Cesarani’s Major Farran’s Hat. Both books deal with the last years of the Mandate, when the rightist nationalists of the Irgun and the Stern Gang waged a fierce campaign against British forces and the Arab population, provoking an increasingly harsh and ...”

“... rest of the book, simultaneous correspondences with two Oxford contemporaries, Frank Thompson and David Hicks, Murdoch, if still not quite a writer, is now at war and no longer the ingénue of the student troupe. The ‘playtime of the ’30s when we were all conscience-ridden spectators’ was over. She remained a Communist, however, toeing the Stalinist ...”

“... Aviv. The ‘handover’ to a civilian authority is to take place after presidential elections are held, but the Scaf hasn’t committed itself to a firm date: maybe next year, maybe mid-2013. ‘The people and the army are one,’ protesters chanted when the army intervened on their side in February. That slogan now seems as plausible as pouvoir à ...”

“... of the series of catalogues of major exhibitions of 18th and early 19th-century British artists held at the Tate in the last seven or eight years – George Stubbs in 1984; Manners and Morals: Hogarth and British Painting in 1987; Wright of Derby last year. None of these was quite as blandly factual as Constable, nor so studiously innocent of the desire to ...”

“... Aron wanted to point out that the Hebrew language has just as many exceptions to the rule, but he held his tongue and revelled in ‘I am jum-peeng ...’ Jumping far, far out in space, halfway to infinity, and soon he was utterly absorbed and utterly alone; jum-peeng; it was like being in a glass bubble, and someone watching from the outside might think Aron ...”

“... to lose a tooth at the same time. After comparing them, Billy walked over to the outdoor well and held his hand over it for a moment. ‘I dropped mine in,’ he said. Jack walked over and tossed his in too. ‘So did I,’ he told his brother. Then Billy stretched out his arm and opened his hand to reveal the tooth still in his palm. ‘I didn’t,’ he ...”

“... heritage of these arguments in forgotten black authors whose works he resurrects. Beginning with David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) and Hosea Easton’s Treatise on the Intellectual Character and the Political Condition of the Coloured People (1837), he surveys some two dozen texts, erudite and eccentric in turn, compiled by ...”

“... of the dead. Antigone was admired by the composer Mendelssohn as a Christian martyr, and has been held up to feminists as a model of ‘masculine’ initiative. But Sally Humphreys’s findings suggest that Sophocles’s audience – despite what Creon says – would not have regarded Antigone’s determination to bury her dead brother as inspired by ...”