“... namely, dead bodies or pieces of them – bones, dust, scraps of blood-soaked cloth. So an even more puzzling question arises: why should the holy dead need their mortal remains to do great things? Other cultures and religions have also venerated their dead, whether ancestors in general or a special class of holy persons – Hebrew prophets, Shi’ite ...”

“... The enterprise in any form, of course, involved a crushing weight of primary research: there are more than two hundred and ninety volumes of Francis Place papers in the British Museum. Mr Miles found working through them ‘arduous’ if ‘fascinating’. Because of their great bulk he took ten years to finish his biography (having, in a manner worthy of ...”

“... something of an oversimplification, but not all that much. The tradition is rich and unbroken: in Thomas Elyot’s Latin dictionary of 1538 we find aedificium ‘building’, in Bullokar’s English dictionary of 1616 the minimally anglicised edifice ‘a building’, in the 1979 Collins edifice ‘a building’. For all their bright newness, dictionaries of ...”

“... Prince of Wales’s gardens at Cliveden in 1740, as the finale of the patriotic masque Alfred by Thomas Arne and James Thomson. The performance was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders ...”

“... attracted to the alleged possibility of a pre-colonial historiography of tropical Africa rather more than forty years ago, when thinking about a book entitled On the Trail of the Bushongo, the latter not being a rare quadruped, as I had at first thought when opening the book, but an equatorial tribe or people of whom I had not previously heard tell. The ...”

“... not the alcohol that is making me sleepy. What is happening isn’t even sleepiness exactly, more a minor existential crisis. Still, I suppose the assumption is fair, given the smell on my breath – and this is enough to get me moving. The process is slow and painfully deliberate, but after a moment of supreme effort I eventually, miraculously, get to ...”

“... of the war,’ she thinks, and in any case nothing much happened there in the period she covers. More surprising is that in the first third of the book there isn’t a word about Serbia. The assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 goes by in two sentences, one of which, a quotation from the oracular Bismarck, may be all she needs: ‘some ...”

“... suspicion to which Communism gave birth – and this is becoming less and less obvious and more and more difficult to recognise – makes it difficult for anyone to analyse the history of the past century and to utter words that mean what they mean.’ It’s a difficulty that he overcomes as well as anyone can. This ...”

“... Jinnie Fullerton. This horrible cough! Kind souls. Perhaps their prayers will work with a few more Hail Marys thrown in. Connie or Jinnie (never mind which) murmured ‘The Lord has delivered you into our hands.’ 2 ‘No personal God or any such nonsense’ – Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp to Murry, spouse, from Villa Isola Bella, Menton, 18 October ...”

“... Fliess family and discovered by Peter Swales among the Fliess papers in Jerusalem. We learn much more about Freud’s relationship to Fliess, especially about his extraordinary devotion to Fliess’s odd – if not crackpot – views. Masson, however, does not make any suggestions as to the basis for this attraction. The edition still contains only half the ...”

“... the character of a deliberate debate’: what was at stake, according to Barrell, was ‘more the ownership of the word’. Put most simply, the charges and counter-charges boiled down to the question of who was guilty of imagining treason, who actually imagined the King’s death. The first part of the book talks about the terms available for such ...”

“... is, with his father, the hero of his story, it is Bevins, Vollman and a preacher called Everly Thomas who deliver most of the lines. Joining these three are a throng of shades – each ‘wronged Neglected Overlooked Misunderstood’, as Willie puts it – who are eager to retail their own stories of woe. This is a ghost story, in other words, narrated by ...”

“... were heartily glad to be rid of her, she fouling our house mightily.’ Captain Cook had more success when the Resolution arrived in Woolwich in 1775, carrying birds and animals purchased by Johann Reinhold Forster, the expedition’s naturalist, in South Africa, and intended for the queen. John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, was waiting on the ...”

“... and Giorgione (1877), as well as the notorious conclusion to The Renaissance (1873), but those more familiar texts make up well under a third of a volume that moves from archaic sculpture and pre-Socratic philosophy to Pascal, Rossetti and Mérimée, and includes some distinctly obscure pieces, such as an essay on ...”

“... a run of dedications by the same hand. Agatha Christie is an interesting writer and an even more interesting phenomenon, but is the wording of her dedications interesting or original? ‘To Margaret Rutherford, in admiration’: I share the admiration for Margaret Rutherford, but not the admiration for this as a dedication. There can be no intrinsic ...”