“... Philip the Fair – the king who was soon to burn Knights Templar at the stake and to kidnap a pope – put a tax on all French bishoprics to help finance renewed hostilities against England. Pope Boniface VIII denounced the taxation of clerical property without ecclesiastical permission and Philip responded by banning ...”

“... died in 1599). In L’Essai sur les Moeurs he had seen fit to quote those who had described this Pope as ‘le plus haut, le meilleur, le plus grand des pontifs, des princes et des sages’, and had gone on to apply to him his own criteria for the good ruler and the great prince. By the 18th century there was no one to praise. This period is usually taken as ...”

“... attention in his revolutionary message. Protestants in their own eyes were the true Catholics. The pope’s followers were at best ‘Roman Catholics’, or at worst dupes of a devilish caricature of Jesus the Saviour of the World: an Italian ‘Vicar of Christ’ with papal tiara, sitting on the Seven Hills of Rome, who personified the Antichrist condemned in ...”

“... most important priests would be there; the cleverest theologians would debate him. The pope would watch. Pico was going to dazzle them all. He planned to begin with a poetic, densely allusive speech, which almost no one would understand; then he would make nine hundred pronouncements, each more cryptic than the last, e.g. ‘251. The world’s ...”

“... I am satisfied with Alexander and he ought to be satisfied with me,’ Napoleon wrote to the Empress Josephine in 1807. ‘If he were a woman, I think I would make him my mistress.’ Within five years, the tsar would repay Napoleon’s condescension by rolling back his conquests all across Europe, driving him to Paris and then St Helena, and finally building the Concert of Europe on the remains of his empire ...”

“... Eighteen months later, the Scythians were in Paris, but in a surprising new guise. Tsar Alexander I arrived on the last day of March 1814 at the head of an army of half a million troops from Russia, Britain, Sweden, the Habsburg Empire and the German principalities. No fires were started. Alexander had come, he ...”

“... achievements, the Jesuits quickly attracted suspicion and hostility, including from the occasional pope, and after a quarter-millennium an accumulation of their enemies bullied Pope Clement XIV into dissolving the entire enterprise in 1773. Yet the Society was not that easily undone: it survived in what it would be ...”

“... is in some degree a commentary on what it represents. Of the effect of Bernini’s monument to Pope Alexander VII, Penny says: ‘In the dim light of the basilica it is the glowing white marble and the shimmering diasporo of which we are most aware; but the electric light with which the tomb has been flooded for the photograph illustrated here gives ...”

“... In 1779, a Scottish doctor called William Alexander published a two-volume History of Women. Alexander was a man of the Enlightenment who regarded politeness to women as a mark of civilisation. Savages and ‘musselmen’ might treat their women as sexual helots, but a gentleman was solicitous of his womenfolk ...”

“... cash poor and land rich,’ he said. ‘And who needs more second-growth pine and manzanita?’ Alexander Pope, in his upstream exile at Twickenham, laid out garden and grotto as a conceit, an extension of his work into the world, and a powerful attractor for patrons and lesser talents. To fund the Sierra reinhabitation, as Snyder saw it, he took on ...”

“... results. Neither, however, enjoyed fighting for its own sake, as Caesar did, or Napoleon, or Alexander, or Stonewall Jackson, by far the most talented commander of the American Civil War. To them it was – or became – like a drug, an addiction that could not be given up. Had he lived, Alexander might have invaded ...”

“... 4); and so on. The text often blooms into a special boxed feature, such as: ‘The Joke about the Pope and the Chief Rabbi’ (this takes a whole page) or: Haggadah (Pop Quiz #1) Q. When Alex and Adam had a smoke, how much of the fun was in the rolling? A. In the book it is written: Oh, about 78 per cent. Every so often Smith will surprise us with an ...”

“... governments. Scientific discovery is evidently a dimly understood process. The new biography of Alexander Fleming by Gwyn Macfarlane sheds some unusual light on the fog. One reason for the prevailing lack of understanding is that the canons of writing in professional scientific journals – the ‘scientific literature’ – enforce a style of reporting ...”

“... Crucifixions, though not to the crude forger whose handiwork, together with its authentication by Pope Alexander VI, is proudly displayed at S. Croce in Gerusalemme at Rome. In the later Roman Empire Greeks were under increasing pressure to learn Latin; their efforts produce substandard Latin of a very different kind from that of poorly educated native ...”

“... Barberini emblem, the bee: Melissographia, an engraved broadsheet eulogising both the Barberini Pope and their own keen-eyed work, showing magnified bees (front, back, sideways and dissected head parts, surrounded by bay leaves and the Papal keys and tiara), was the first printed illustration to have been made with the aid of a microscope. Apes Diana was a ...”