“... after the misogyny she faced for daring to present a BBC2 series without the looks of a film star, and after the OBE, comes the doorstop SPQR to charm the charts and critics both. Beard gives us a sweeping Roman history that’s both reassuringly familiar and abidingly strange. The material matters, of course, and it doesn’t get better than ...”

“... Theodore Sedgwick who came to Stockbridge ‘after the Revolution’, and who was a friend of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington. His descendants (but not, importantly, all of them) are buried, in ‘the Pie’, with their heads facing out and their feet pointing in, towards their ancestor. The legend is, apparently, that on Judgment Day the ...”

“... which gave the Economist the wide-ranging intellectual heft it had hitherto lacked. His star signing was the historian Arnold Toynbee, who wrote a leading article and two or three notes practically every week between 1922 and 1939. But Layton also appointed younger figures, several of whom, such as Douglas Jay, a future Labour minister, and Graham ...”

“... the old Penguin Classics cover for The Great Gatsby. The far end of this group is presided over by Alexander McQueen, in a huge image blown up to fill a 12 foot archway. The designer most closely associated with the resurgence of British fashion in the last twenty years broods with cigarette and skull like a troubled Hamlet to Vivienne Westwood’s fairy ...”

“... Arnold Böcklin, two of the first teachers at the painting academy established by Grand Duke Carl Alexander, would later become major artists, but both left within a few years, repelled by the philistinism of local notables and the formality of the court. A generation later the 25-year-old Richard Strauss was hired, but like others before him felt blocked by ...”

“... forty other translations into English (setting aside such antiquated versions as those by Alexander Ross in 1649 and George Sale in 1734). Some of the most popular have been done by Muslims and vetted by the scholars of al-Azhar in Cairo. Pickthall was a convert to Islam and, under the patronage of the Nizam of Hyderabad, he worked on a translation ...”

“... and flowerbeds overlooked by a 30-foot-high white column on top of which is a miniature yellow star, the symbol of the PKK. The cemetery, built in 2002, holds 67 ornate marble tombs with the names of very young male and female fighters inscribed on them. Further north, closer to the Turkish border, they have hidden a museum at the bottom of a gorge; a ...”

“... Venetian girl’. On that occasion he had been competing in the swim with a bachelor friend, Alexander Scott, and the Cavalier Angelo Mengaldo, a former officer in Napoleon’s Army who claimed to have swum the Berezina under Russian gunfire. Mengaldo took to a gondola long before Venice was reached, and Scott gave up at the Rialto bridge.If Byron’s ...”

“... and spent most of his long academic career between Paris and Cologne, where Thomas Aquinas was his star student. Even then, the university was no ivory tower. Faculty had to deal with heresy charges, censorship by overreaching bishops, rivalry between friars and secular masters, and drunken brawls among students – who could matriculate as young as 14. One ...”

“... never said it. The line appears to have originated in a decision of – of all courts – Star Chamber in 1569: ‘One Cartwright brought a slave from Russia and would scourge him, for which he was questioned, and it was resolved, that England was too pure an air for slaves to breathe in.’ The earliest surviving account of the passage is in a ...”

“... blessed with two books that combine to give us the fullest and most discerning portrait of a movie star we will ever have. But Cary Grant deserves this as much as we do. His subject is Pretending. There are those among us who felt our lives were shaped by the balanced but enigmatic Grant, even as we knew (without understanding properly) that this tanned Mr ...”

“... predicament wasn’t too far from my own struggles as both a theatre critic and the son of a movie star. Now, as the plane touched down on the sun-bleached runway, I felt an exquisite excitement. I was out of the audience. I was in the game. I was a player. Hooray indeed.I was living in a cottage at the back of a friend’s walled California Tudor house in ...”

“... in an appropriately ironic way. The books gradually went into the trade, many of them to become star items in the growing American rare book collections of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Though​ Lamb left Christ’s Hospital at the age of fourteen, he knew his Latin. One of the books that Bartlett and Welford listed, the Latin poems of Vincent (or ...”

“... his bewilderment, totally eclipsed by Cagney and co as gangster films hit their stride. Of a child-star called Baby Richard Headrick: dunked in a fountain thirty times in an afternoon, shivering and fighting back tears, and with his father standing guard. Schulberg’s detached yet sympathetic gaze seems to have been sharply focused almost since birth, and ...”

“... weapons – God uses them to pelt the devils who listen in on his conversations with angels:A star caught a devil eavesdroppingAnd shot down, a flame burning in its wakeLike a horseman in the desert who has loosened his turbanIts ends fluttering behind himIn Book I, ‘On the Heavens and the Earth’, al-Nuwayri classifies the constellations and also the ...”