“... might be performed. In this process of spiritual colonisation, the Catholic clergy showed little compunction about taking over former pagan sanctuaries and appropriating their numinous aura. As Pope Gregory the Great remarked in his instructions of 601 for the Christian conversion of England, people were more likely to worship in places with which ...”

“... slipstream, craving his attention and his praise; they were all highly intelligent, with little formal education; and they all had a taste for (to borrow the title of Diana Holderness’s recent memoir) ‘the Ritz and the Ditch’ – in other words, for the high life and the low life. They’d be dining at the Ritz (usually at someone else’s ...”

“... Riding’s fast-paced account sticks roughly with Poole and Bend’s interpretations, but puts a little more emphasis on the home secretary’s desire to crush the popular movement. She agrees that Peterloo was a massacre. Conservative interpretations have previously indulged in some pedantry about this because the number of deaths did not reach the ...”

“... industry and enthusiasm evoke admiration, but perhaps a general reader needs something a little lighter, more sceptical, more historically-orientated. No such problems arise with Mr Fowles’s short and elegant essay on Stonehenge, which is part history and archaeology, part literary exercise and part moral philosophy. Mr Fowles seems to have been ...”

“... III knew that it wasn’t enough to host a round table linking his reign with the legend of King Arthur, as he did at Windsor in 1358. For maximum effect, he also sent heralds to announce the event abroad. Medieval public relations had to be managed just as carefully as their modern equivalents. Edward II tried to curtail minstrel activity, possibly to quash ...”

“... through their rubbish. At the end of the 19th century, two Oxford academics, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, set off for the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus in search of Greek texts written on papyrus. Over six seasons, assisted by scores of local workmen, they excavated thousands of papyri from the city’s rubbish mounds and transported them to ...”

“... me to treat fiction-as-art as a happy accident rather than a desideratum. And if there is too little fiction-as-art for fiction-addicted adults, how much less for children! Tot up all the children’s novels commended by Bratton, Inglis and Tucker, divide them by the ones available to a child at any particular stage of its development, and there will be ...”

“... not being entirely in possession of his means, in a kind of writing relatively new to him, does little to lessen the worth of his living gratitude. Since he is what used to be called a good hater and a bonny fighter (‘I am happy in my glittering envelope, and will fight those who would puncture it,’ ‘I am not prepared to give up my inheritance without ...”

“... made no more sense than it makes for 20th-century New Yorkers to hanker after being ruled by King Arthur and his knights. Stone’s history is a good deal like Mark Twain’s, and hardly the worse for it either. Still, historical, textual, and interpretative questions will creep in. Did Socrates hanker after a return to aristocratic or monarchical ...”

“... home, where I was angry with my wife for her things lying about, and in my passion kicked the little fine Baskett which I bought her in Holland and broke it, which troubled me after I had done it. Within all the afternoon, setting up shelfes in my study. At night to bed.’ And there it was, a day in the life of a young man on the ...”

“... generalisations are underscored by a number of errors. Westerns attributes Martin Ritt’s Hud to Arthur Penn and the well-publicised love of ‘Home on the Range’ to Theodore Roosevelt rather than Franklin; it imagines that cameras possessed zoom lenses in 1939 and that the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s defiance before Congress consisted in ...”

“... stood in the way of an American version.) According to Suchoff, Finkielkraut is no Allan Bloom or Arthur Schlesinger: ‘far from a neoconservative’, he is, rather, a pluralist in the vein of Henry Louis Gates, and his reflections on the differences between the terms ‘Israelite’ and ‘Jew’ find an echo in the American opposition between ...”

“... fringes of politics an unelected dilettante makes a President; his wife destroys his successor. Arthur Schlesinger has described Philip Graham as one of the more brilliant and tragic figures of his generation, a man of extraordinary vitality, audacity and charm, who was fascinated by power and men who possessed it. Graham was close to Lyndon Johnson, was ...”

“... that extended across Europe into Russia. When she died her great-grandson Albert Frederick Arthur George was five and not in the direct line of succession. Finding himself at the age of 41 seated on Edward I’s coronation chair in Westminster Abbey amid ‘the red, the gold, the gilt, the grandeur’, he was full of nerves and foreboding. ‘This is ...”

“... imagery, its lack of all punctuation, exhibit a determination to be ‘absolument moderne’, as Arthur Rimbaud had thought all poets must be some forty years earlier. Beckett translated the poem’s visceral, if enigmatic, last line, ‘Soleil cou coupé’, as ‘Sun corseless head’. This perhaps underplays the violence which other translators have ...”