“... might serve as useful allies in the Crusades. This belief was reinforced by the legend of Prester John, which held that there was a powerful Christian monarch somewhere in the East, whose overriding ambition was to liberate the Holy Sepulchre from the infidels. Further support for the story came from a fictitious letter suggesting that a mysterious and ...”

“... In​ the TV drama Bad Sisters, set in Dublin, four sisters conspire to murder their brother-in-law John Paul, an abusive monster who is married to their beloved sister, Grace. The dynamics of the marriage are clear from the pilot. It’s Christmas Day and tradition has it that the siblings meet at Forty Foot – a swimming spot just south of Dublin – for a dip ...”

“... naval greatness, rather than a celebration of it (‘rule’ not ‘rules’); but it subsequently took on a life of its own, as a paean of praise to Britain’s 19th-century maritime might, and was the only one of the four patriotic compositions which would eventually become associated with the Last Night that was then in existence. In 1895, ‘Pomp and ...”

“... rather think I don’t need to. My first reading, before any reviews appeared, concurs with what I took Peter Ackroyd to be saying on Kaleidoscope, that the bulk of the narrative can be read and enjoyed in a moderately literal way as a mystery story set in London, even though the mystery turns out to be not soluble at this level. My second reading was helped ...”

“... in Scotland.Presumably your mother had to go to work, with such young children to provide for.She took in lodgers. Indeed, that’s how she managed. But my father had had this Scottish thing about education, so there was no question of any of us leaving school or getting a job.Money was always very tight then?We had a rather wonderful well-off aunt in ...”

“... the first translator of the Japanese edition suddenly went missing, the second went mad, and it took a third to finish the job. Dai was frank with the Guardian about her own woes, though they fell short of vanishing into thin air or losing her mind. The quarrels with her husband were trying (he wanted her to go to bed; she wanted to stay up and ...”

“... of the stairs as one climbs up to some newspaper office’ to know what he was facing when he took on Beltaine in 1899 and Samhain in 1901. Around the same time, the country’s first student magazine, St Stephen’s of University College Dublin, was rejecting ‘The Day of the Rabblement’ by a young troublemaker called James Joyce. He wasn’t turned ...”

“... are prohibited, and a high standard of financial and moral behaviour is expected. Yet this ideal took a long time to emerge. In 1600, political offices were usually seen as the property of the monarch, bestowed as a reward for service. Many offices were unpaid, but most conferred social capital of various kinds and also carried the expectation of profit, to ...”

“... from England to escape was Shakespearean theatre. Although the British military authorities who took over the John Street theatre in New York during the hostilities must have wondered whether the productions of Richard III, King Lear, The Taming of the Shrew and Macbeth that they staged there between 1777 and 1783 were ...”

“... He affects​ the Metaphysics,’ Dryden wrote of John Donne, ‘not only in his satires, but in his Amorous Verses, where Nature alone should reign; and perplexes the Minds of the Fair Sex with nice Speculations of Philosophy, when he shou’d ingage their Hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of Love ...”

“... the Society’s history in more than six hundred pages, ably translated from German by John Noël Dillon. Markus Friedrich’s volume could be described as relentless, but its barrage of information is a trustworthy basis from which to begin to understand one of the most remarkable products of Counter-Reformation energy. The Jesuits have always ...”

“... In his off hours, London ‘wanted to be where the winds of adventure blew’, as he wrote in John Barleycorn, his ‘alcoholic reminiscences’. He was a child labourer in Oakland at 14, a Bay Area pirate at 15, a transcontinental hobo at 16, an able-bodied seaman at 17, a New York State prisoner at 18, a California ‘work beast’ at 20 and a Yukon ...”

“... allowed many brilliant young things to roll about on their front lawns, and some days they even took a drink in the company of these writers, or let their dogs loose to lick their fidgety, callused hands. A sad business, this little kindness, but now and then it proved a wise investment of faith or pity. Mr Cerf, of Random House, was especially good in this ...”

“... capital sniffing out the news. Writers like H. R. Knickerbocker, Malcolm Muggeridge, Eugene Lyons, John Gunther and Walter Duranty were our eyes and cars in the world. The milieux in which these men functioned in the Twenties and Thirties were turbulent and romantic. Moving constantly between Paris, Berlin and Moscow, they knew each other; they frequented the ...”

“... a sane, amusing, unintimidating introduction to the consequences of mathematical illiteracy, John Allen Paulos shows how a little arithmetic can cast light on the cohesiveness of cultures. He quotes an experiment in which the psychologist Stanley Milgrim gave each member of a randomly-selected group of people a document and a ‘target individual’ to ...”