“... his earliest intellectual heroes were English and Continental humanists of the Renaissance – Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Erasmus – questing, chivalric figures who pursued their arduous scholarly experiments in a landscape fraught with dangers and temptations (Smallwood also discerns a ‘tantalising’ series of parallels with Montaigne). Those ...”

“... The absurdity of the Gothick was captured and its pretensions crisply punctured by Jane Austen and Thomas Love Peacock, but reality was often stranger than anything that even the most fetid literary imagination could come up with. Nothing could have been odder, more menacing or even ...”

“... ceremony to collect the prize. Except that the rambling, shambling figure at the podium wasn’t Thomas Pynchon at all, but a comedian and actor, ‘Professor’ Irwin Corey, who had been hired by Pynchon’s publisher to impersonate the novelist. The audience gradually got the joke as Corey, who was once described by Kenneth Tynan as a ‘travesty of all ...”

“... Born around 1225 near the small southern Italian town of Aquino, Thomas Aquinas attended the University of Naples, and while in the city entered the Dominican Order. He then went north to pursue his studies under Albert the Great, also a Dominican, in Paris and Cologne. He was appointed lecturer and then professor at the University of Paris, but returned to Naples to organise the Dominican house of studies there ...”

“... could tolerate one or two black neighbours, but at a certain point they’d all up sticks more or less together and head out. The phrase became common currency in 2000, when the New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell used it as the title of his first book, subtitled ‘How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference’. The Tipping Point is written in ...”

“... black jacket and perhaps the same charcoal waistcoat, but he’s not as imposing as he is in that more famous portrait, maybe because the Reform picture is unfinished. There’s a blurred left hand at bottom right: had the artist not decided what to do with it? Swynnerton’s portrait of Henry James (1910-11) ‘There is no greater work of art than a ...”

“... a no-brainer. And just in case you’re the kind of person who remembers the titles of novels more easily than the names of writers, the cover of The Night Watch reminds you that Waters is the ‘bestselling author of Fingersmith’. But sometimes a writer’s own work just isn’t enough: the proof copy of Jonathan Raban’s Surveillance, due from ...”

“... Ground motions from the earthquake in Abruzzo, more than 100 kilometres away, woke my neighbours in their beds, though I managed to snore my way through it all. I live in a flat on the top floor of a house with a new, allegedly earthquake-resistant roof, and it’s possible the reason I didn’t wake up has something to do with that ...”

“... in 541 CE; the Black Death, beginning in 1345 and persisting with recurrent outbreaks for more than three centuries; and finally the much smaller pandemic that broke out in south-east China in 1894 and ran for some thirty years. The Black Death was therefore a rare event, ‘with only one generally accepted precursor and no equivalent ...”

“... give a reason for Marlowe’s arrest, but we know it was connected to the arrest of his colleague Thomas Kyd a few days earlier, on a charge of political libelling. During the search of Kyd’s lodgings, a certain ‘vile heretical’ manuscript was found, and under interrogation Kyd ‘affirmed’ that it belonged to Marlowe; other evidence of Marlowe’s ...”

“... it with too small a gun. Ingram is one of three men – the others are the amateur Egyptologist Thomas Douglas Murray (1841-1911) and the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, who died within weeks of opening the tomb of Tutankhamun in February 1923 – whose stories Roger Luckhurst reconstructs in his alluring book, which shows that the mummy’s curse is one of those ...”

“... Keith Thomas prefaces this book with a quotation from the greatest of English medievalists, F.W. Maitland: ‘A century hence . . . by slow degrees the thoughts of our forefathers, their common thoughts about common things, will become thinkable once more.’ That aspiration, to recover ‘common thoughts about common things’, was a novelty in Victorian historiography ...”

“... flies; Louis XI did the same to stags; Archduke Franz Ferdinand took pride in having killed more than half a million animals, including the 2150 pieces of small game he bagged in one day and the 3000th stag he shot shortly before Gavrilo Princip shot him. Through the centuries, in Britain and across Europe, cats had the hardest time of all, hurled from ...”

“... the vocabulary of publishing to denote prudish expurgation; Curlism, which meant the opposite (and more besides), was already fading from the language when the figure who inspired the term, the flamboyant bookseller Edmund Curll, had been dead for less than a decade. Chatterton was still using it a generation later (‘I know the art of Curlism, pretty ...”

“... around the world of believers are a salutary reminder that our passion for tangibility evokes more than just that irritable reaching after fact and reason that Keats declared to be the antithesis of Shakespeare. In the Shakespeare canon at present, fact seems to be even more of a problem than interpretation. With such ...”