“... Had she not had about her a touch of the holy fool, the strange and specialised soul of a secular saint, her life and work would not have attained its compelling singularity. She famously said that the artist should paint with her back to the world. The world, meanwhile, was always ready to embrace her, and in the 1960s she was a successful member of the New ...”

“... disillusionment inspired the grim panacea advanced in 1698 by the cosmopolitan, freethinking laird Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun. Confronting the problem of mass evictions and vagrancy brought about by the famine, Fletcher recommended the establishment of the form of slavery found in antiquity as a means of relieving the poor and putting them to work for the ...”

“... you?” said Silver, derisively … “What is this good? … by all stories, you ain’t no such saint … Which is which? Which is good, and which bad?”’ As the captain starts to denounce Silver again, the piece ends with the captain saying: ‘“But there’s the ink-bottle opening. To quarters!” And indeed the author was just then beginning to ...”

“... long-debated Iraqi weapons of mass destruction did not exist.’ Four weeks after the broadcast of Andrew Gilligan’s Today story, Campbell had not asked for an apology for it specifically, had not referred it to the BBC complaints department, and had not mentioned it at lunch with Gilligan’s boss, Richard Sambrook. But he then made ‘three key ...”

“... I was surrounded by boys with what I still think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the ...”

“... that some of the richest men in the US – Henry Clay Frick, Henry Huntington, Joseph Widener and Andrew Mellon among them – employed only two types of contemporary artist (often recommended by Duveen himself): the conservative decorator and the conservative architect. They provided appropriate settings for Bellini and Botticelli among the tapestries and ...”

“... of Mylapore took me to Little Mount, a rocky hillock rising from the coastal plain, where the saint spent his last days in a cave; and then on inland to the larger St Thomas’s Mount, where I climbed the 134 steps to the little white shrine on the summit which marks the site of his martyrdom, speared to death by soldiers under the orders of a hostile ...”

“... her early novels and, according to Stannard, ‘told his children to protect her because she was a saint’. Posh Catholics, Tory anarchists and American anglophiles of related leanings still make up part of her constituency, and less astringent productions like A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), plus memories of Maggie Smith as Jean Brodie, gave rise to a ...”

“... diehard anti-Home Rulers appeared to flirt with insurrection and civil war. The Tory leader, Andrew Bonar Law, declared in a speech at Blenheim in 1912 that he could ‘imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I should not be prepared to support them’. The Curragh Mutiny and Larne gun-running incident in the spring of 1914 showed ...”

“... the Hills, though their book, Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends, contributes to the myth of Saint Jane as surely as Austen-Leigh’s Memoir, because they don’t patronise Austen. They are Janeites, as surely as Austen-Leigh is not. The growing nostalgia for an imagined pre-industrial England was reflected in their creation of a world between fact and ...”

“... nymphet Anne Howard (by now Lady Sylvius). This presents Margaret Godolphin née Blagge as a saint, who sought out Communion each week, posted admonitory notes to herself around her chamber to think fine thoughts and act fine deeds, and who prayed with Evelyn, without Evelyn and for Evelyn. After the first publication of the Life in 1847 Margaret ...”

“... according to friends, ‘the international champion in the Wife-of-Writer Competition’, ‘the Saint Sebastian of wives’. The marriage and Vladimir’s artistic greatness, as they both perceived it, was the only real country to which either of them belonged once each had been geographically exiled. Their son, Dmitri, was given residential rights, though ...”

“... ad by his pupils, who stabbed him with their writing implements. That might make him the patron saint of pedants, though Vilgard of Ravenna has a claim to that title too: he had a dream in which demons disguised as Virgil, Horace and Juvenal told him that every word they wrote was true, and he was condemned to death for heresy in 970. By 1678 Ulrik Huber ...”

“... his powers to a ‘corpse’, a ‘ghost’, a stranded ‘wreck’. An apter representation was Saint-Gaudens’s caricature of him on a bronze medallion, the domed head in profile attached to the body of a bristling porcupine. ‘My dispute, or rather my defence against self-criticism,’ Adams wrote to Barrett Wendell in 1909, ‘is that our failures are ...”

“... years later lamented the loss of Franklin’s 1845 expedition – a ‘sad subject’ which, as Andrew Lambert has shown, owed as much to Sabine’s magnetic crusade as it did to the quest for the Northwest Passage. By 1860, Faraday was coming, as these letters reveal and as he baldly acknowledged, to the end of his career. Though his physical health ...”