“... the Eternall Dove,   A black-fac’d house will love. A hundred and fifty years later we find William Blake putting forward the same idea in his ‘The Little Black Boy’ (1789): My mother bore me in the southern wild, And I am black, but O! my soul is white Blake has his little black boy meeting a ‘little English boy’ in heaven, and the final ...”

“... practised in public elsewhere. Sawday includes an observer’s description of the embalmment of James I: The King’s body was about the 29th of March disembowelled, and his harte was found to be great but soft, his liver fresh as a young man’s; one of his kidneys very good, but the other shrunke so littel as they could hardly find yt ... the semyture of ...”

“... art. Reading Gaston, I was reminded repeatedly of paintings by Lawrence Alma-Tadema and John William Waterhouse. Pater’s interest in these works might help us to understand their appeal not only to his contemporaries, but to audiences today. Queen Margaret of Navarre is first mentioned in the novel with a Greek quotation that links her to Homer’s ...”

“... easier to understand. A video, too, was in some quarters said to be to blame for the killing of James Bulger in 1993. But once again, the willingness to accept this had to do with the extent to which Child’s Play 3 provided in the figure of Chucky a fictional precedent for Robert Thompson and Jon Venables: not an inspiration to the children, but an ...”

“... about circumcision, which was not practised in England – or even drink his blood. According to James Shapiro in his excellent Shakespeare and the Jews (1990) it was even thought that Jewish men menstruated and might need an occasional supplement of gentile blood. Then there were the stories about Jewish abuse of the Host. If any of this got into ...”

“... Men’s Association, a body which called for ‘rational’ organic reform: so organic that William Lovett, its figurehead, later turned to writing manuals on physiology, diet and anatomy. Although they drafted the original People’s Charter, Lovett’s men were soon overtaken by the Chartist leaders of the Midlands and the North: men such as Humphrey ...”

“... at Marham was made a permanent military unit. Lord Tedder’s RAF Deputy Chief of Staff, Sir William Dickson, proposed that the US bases remain designated as Royal Air Force stations: a cosmetic disguise intended to alleviate local hostility to the presence of foreign military forces on British soil in peacetime. The proposal was accepted, and on this ...”

“... of his European friends, by contrast, delighted in his lack of grandeur. ‘Adorable’ was Henry James’s word for him; he was ‘the most approachable, the most practicable, the least unsafe man of genius it has been my fortune to meet. He was so simple, so natural, so modest, so destitute of personal pretension … that one almost doubted at moments ...”

“... I started writing it, in my head, the very second I saw the video footage of the Liverpool toddler James Bulger being led away by the two ten-year-olds who would become his murderers. There was something familiar about the boys – their jackets, their haircuts, their way of inclining their heads to one another, their furtiveness, their ...”

“... of dealing with social paralysis and national demands. They were both haunted by the spectre of James Joyce. Borges was, he proudly wrote in 1925, ‘the first traveller from the Hispanic world to set foot upon the shores of Ulysses’. But this is not entirely true. Instead he was, as he admitted, one of the first of the hordes who had read the novel, but ...”

“... are excluded, is attested by many contemporary witnesses, among them foreign travellers. If William Harrison, from whose Description of England of 1587 much in this book is drawn, can be believed, one visiting Spaniard thought that the cottagers of England enjoyed a diet unparalleled in Spain or France – the equal of that of a monarch. A member of ...”

“... Museum says. The couple were illustrious knights of the royal chamber of Richard II, Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, ‘the Castor and Pollux of the Lollard movement’, as the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane called them. Neville died just four days after Clanvowe, the inscription records, in October 1391. The Westminster Chronicle ...”

“... first models were Dutch masters (Terborch and Metsu), the ‘indefinable hardness’ which Henry James, writing in 1872, identified does not come from them. Verisimilitude, James says, has become an end in itself: Meissonier understands to a buttonhole the uniform of the Grand Army. He is equally familiar with the facial ...”

“... the order of their appearance in the text) Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D.H. Lawrence, Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), C.P. Snow and Virginia Woolf. There are also allusions to other texts, such as William Golding’s Free ...”

“... of account should be given of the shaping of the conditions of life by life itself? In the 1970s James Lovelock, independent scientist and inventor, proposed the Gaia hypothesis. He argued that the Earth regulates itself, and responds to change, in the same sort of way that a single living organism does. The Earth acts to keep itself alive. Lovelock’s new ...”