“... 1918. No one knows war is coming, and with it the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself. As Nicholas Spice said, writing about the novel a year and a half or so ago (LRB, 16 October 1997), it is part of its genius to make us almost forget the catastrophe which hangs over it. ‘Almost but not quite: we experience the unreal and troubled somnolence of ...”

“... died. When they were children both he and his sister nearly died. Two of his boyhood friends, Thomas Linley and Giuseppe Maria Pallavicini, both of great musical talent, died before they reached 20. At 22, he stood by while his mother died. Four of his children died. Then, when he was not yet 36, Mozart died. An attack of acute rheumatic fever, it’s now ...”

“... autumn), and Alex Karp, Thiel’s classmate at Stanford, now Palantir’s CEO and the author, with Nicholas Zamiska, of The Technological Republic, a critique of Silicon Valley’s unadventurousness that effectively serves as a sales brochure for his firm.Karp prides himself in being a rebel and disruptor and describes himself as a ‘socialist’ (his ...”

“... they were published with immense success in 1590 as illustrations (engraved by Theodor de Bry) to Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia – suggests that what was made as a record was used as advertising. The Report was issued in German, Latin and French editions as well as in English. That Harriot and White’s book was ...”

“... blur of his mufti. ‘Are you filming?’ he said. ‘Filming what?’ said the cameraman, James Nicholas. The priest said: ‘Please don’t show this family.’ James reached along the stock of the camera and flicked a switch. Trimming what you film has become second nature in the province. Camera crews do not favour the faces of RUC officers; the cabbies ...”

“... In a​ 2005 poll to find the most infamous British villains of the last millennium, Thomas Arundel unexpectedly won the 15th-century nomination, emerging in the public eye as more dastardly than Richard III and as wicked as Jack the Ripper and Oswald Mosley. This startling condemnation reflects Arundel’s place in popular Protestant mythology as the man who persecuted the Lollards and – so the story goes – banned the Bible in English ...”

“... whose oeuvre includes a series of envelope writings, or as he called them, ‘pomenvylopes’. Nicholas Moore (1918-86) was one of the most conspicuous stars of the London poetry scene of the 1940s, during which decade he published seven collections and two pamphlets. For a variety of reasons, however, he gave up writing at the start of the 1950s: he ...”

“... believers, and no need to emancipate themselves from the ‘servile popish fear’ against which Thomas Cartwright protested. It is the immunity from fear which makes the urge to destroy unintelligible. How does this book meet the challenge of making iconoclasm intelligible to the imagination of its readers? Here, Dr Aston has been less successful: she ...”

“... impressed by Harrington’s acknowledgment of his debt to that profound enemy of republicanism, Thomas Hobbes, and to have noticed the purposes which, for all their obvious disagreements, Hobbes and Harrington shared. Hobbes is the subject of two strong essays. Quentin Skinner follows the erratic development of his attitude to the Classical tradition which ...”

“... were assured of a pension from the bureaucracy set up by Henry VIII and his details man and fixer, Thomas Cromwell. Abbot Hawford’s career was not over; he died seventeen years later as dean of Worcester Cathedral, also lately a Benedictine monastery. While abbot of Evesham, Hawford had been a loyal henchman of Cromwell’s, but as dean at ...”

“... among the young, or the literate classes, or – extraordinarily – the Roman Catholic Church. Thomas Robinson, a lapsed friar, in a pamphlet published in 1622 called The Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon, described the comfortable life of a father confessor to the nuns there: ‘Then after supper it is usual for him to read a little of Venus and ...”

“... of English literary documents have stayed convicted. In two famous cases, those of the 17-year-old Thomas Chatterton, who fabricated poems he attributed to a mythical 15th-century Bristol monk, and the equally immature William Henry Ireland, who forged manuscripts by Shakespeare before which Boswell knelt in adoration, apologists have found a degree of ...”

“... Cause for Alarm (1938), which also turns on German-Italian relations in the run-up to war. Nicholas Marlow, a young British engineer, loses his job on the day he proposes to his girlfriend. After several weeks of trying with increasing desperation to find new employment, he accepts, not without misgivings, and with the disapproval of a socialist ...”

“... globalism that seems to interest Anderson most is that of the mid-century émigré geostrategist Nicholas Spykman, who in America’s Strategy in World Politics (1942) – ‘perhaps the most striking single exercise in geopolitical literature of any land’, Anderson says – spared his readers the dogmas of liberal democracy and the free ...”

“... could say that this is no more than an account of growing old. But not quite. My former colleague Nicholas Mostyn writes gloomily that ‘we will likely lose speech, mobility and continence and be beset by excruciating pain – but no doctor will ever give us a terminal diagnosis.’ Many of us are reliant, as I am, on a patient, tireless, uncomplaining and ...”