“... the plague? Gilman isn’t much interested in counter-examples, such as the words of the musician Thomas Whythorne during the outbreak of 1563 (quoted by the historian Paul Slack in his still unsurpassed 1985 study, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England): ‘I looked every minute of an hour when I should be visited as the rest were. I doubting the ...”

“... The principle that ‘perpetuity’ was forbidden existed before and throughout the reign of Henry VIII. ‘The mischief that would arise to the public,’ a Master of the Rolls later said, ‘from estates remaining for ever or for a long time inalienable or untransferable [would be] a damp to industry and a prejudice to trade.’ The mischief caused by ...”

“... wants to link this up to a strand in Scottish philosophical history, encapsulated in the work of Thomas Reid (1710-96) on common sense, in which trusting one’s faculties, investing belief in one’s natural judgment, is fundamental – and a universal given to mankind. As Kelman has it, Chomsky’s Cartesian common sense tradition and the Scottish common ...”

“... Nancy Was President Roosevelt’ (a grinning Nancy replacing Teddy Roosevelt between Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln on Mount Rushmore); ‘If Nancy Was a Drawing by Leonardo da Vinci’ (her stolid features and purposeful stomp sketched on a sheet of Old Master drawings between noble profiles, sorrowing Madonnas, plaintive putti and ...”

“... playmates and arrange a proper reunion. Having put Rabbit Angstrom to rest and closed the book on Henry Bech, Updike understands the formalities of reintroducing characters who have been kept in storage. It’s been more than two decades since the original novel and the mental picture of its warlock and witches was colonised by the movie version, remembered ...”

“... that his body was altered in some fundamental way; there was a frog or serpent inside him. In 1685 Thomas Willis judged the melancholic-hypochondriac patient to be prey to ‘wandering pains, also cramps and numbness with a sense of formication’, as well as low spirits, wandering attention and fear of death. Since then the term ‘hypochondria’ has ...”

“... of French, an early familiarity with Continental art and a lifelong friendship with Bodley’s son Thomas, the future diplomat and founder of the Bodleian Library. On his return he was apprenticed to a leading London goldsmith, Robert Brandon, whose daughter Alice he later married. His subsidiary skills as a jeweller and engraver belong within the ambit of ...”

“... to the full her talents as a close reader of word and image: one on the novel of ideas from Thomas Mann to J.M. Coetzee and Nicola Barker; the other on the creepily insouciant photographs of Torbjørn Rødland. In both cases, the gimmick’s compromised form seems like the only way to accommodate ‘“ideas” imported from criticism or ...”

“... Hotot gives a sense of time’s fractured geometry, dating a book to ‘the 33rd year of King Henry [III] son of King John, which is 5448 years from the beginning of the world, 1249 from the birth of Christ, 1216 from Christ’s death, 544 from the building of Peterborough, 184 from the Norman Conquest, 79 from the martyrdom of Becket and 34 from the ...”

“... lug through the streets and to the city’s outlying neighbourhoods. In the mid-19th century, Henry Mayhew estimated that five thousand hawkers descended on Covent Garden on a busy Saturday, ready to carry away the produce in barrows and baskets for distribution across the city. Hawkers bought cheap, with some waiting until the end of selling hours to ...”

“... goes for me too.23 September. I knew Hilary Mantel was a good writer long before she fell for Thomas Cromwell (and it was a kind of love affair). I read her earlier novel Every Day Is Mother’s Day about a Northern social worker and found its dialogue funny and enviable. Her much lauded characterisation of Cromwell was harder to take, my feeling being ...”

“... ventures boldly into Anglo-Saxon England, progresses through satirists such as Walter Map (under Henry II) and Chaucer (under Richard II), through the attempts to reanimate classical verse satire in the late Elizabethan period, on (at length) through the 18th century, right up to Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It. Sperrin sees satire as being ‘primarily ...”

“... Kafka (the first English translation of ‘Metamorphosis’, again by Jolas), Michel Leiris, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Herbert Read, Soupault and Jolas himself. Glancing through its faded and disintegrating back issues or reading Dougald McMillan’s transition: The History of a Literary Era 1927-38 (1975), one finds an astonishing compendium of the most ...”

“... are inspiring neighbours to slit each others’ throats.12 March. Reading P. Ackroyd’s Thomas More, which I finish today, leaves me in two minds, the tolerance and scepticism of the author of Utopia and the dogmatism and heresy-hunting of the lawyer never adding up and not short of hypocrisy. It’s hard not to feel there is something specifically ...”

“... it was as though my schoolfellows and I had stumbled into the pages of ‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’ or another of the horrid inventions in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Led past stacks of disintegrating coffins, from which skulls and yellowing bones spilled across the dusty floor, we were introduced to the crypt’s ...”