“... When the Whitechapel Gallery held a fine anniversary exhibition in 1982, the then director, Nicholas Serota, hoped Wren would offer ‘a salutary example’ for the planners of Docklands. He didn’t, except for a more recent Dome at Greenwich. The occult tradition recounted in Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat, with its invocation of Wren’s dark protégé ...”

“... English’), though understandable, are nonetheless ‘in some way bad’, as Neil Smith and Nicholas Allott put it in their study of Chomsky, and that the ability to sense this badness is innate. Another piece of evidence for innateness, on the Chomskyan view, is the ease with which children learn their first language, contrasted with the difficulty ...”

“... of King’s (and Queen’s) Bench, which was not modest in its pretensions. ‘This court,’ Sir Thomas Fleming said, ‘is the jurisdiction of the queen herself. It is so high that in its presence other jurisdictions cease.’ It had, according to Coke in 1615, ‘the survey of all other courts’. Lord Chancellor Ellesmere sought to resist this ...”

“... sheep farmer, he is helped up the social ladder by the most socially mobile of all Tudor lawyers, Thomas Cromwell, yet he remains principled, modest and compassionate, a humanist in the modern as well as the Tudor sense. It’s significant that he is a hunchback, a painful disability that affects how others see him as well as his own view of himself. He weeps ...”

“... with sources. In addition to official documents, chroniclers such as Henry Knighton, Adam Usk, Thomas Walsingham and Jean Froissart wrote detailed narratives, partisan but not of one mind. For obvious reasons, their histories focus on the nobility. Although England was a precociously centralised realm with a sophisticated bureaucracy, it had neither a ...”

“... youth on whom Cleopatra bestows a quick glance of regret. The couch is spread; the poem ends. D.M. Thomas, who has made some excellent translations of Pushkin’s poems, has also been daring enough to include in his novel Ararat (successor to The White Hotel) a verse ‘continuation’ of this story. He has the soldier and the philosopher submit successively ...”

“... the mid-1730s lobbied theatre managements to stage more Shakespeare; she had also encouraged Sir Thomas Hanmer, a former Speaker of the House of Commons, to prepare the Oxford edition of Shakespeare published in 1744, with a picture of the Westminster Abbey statue as a frontispiece. Nor were her artistic interests confined to Shakespeare: among those the ...”

“... He needed his royal supremacy preached up and down the land. And who better to preach it than Thomas Cranmer or Hugh Latimer, full of Continental learning, opposed to Papal pretensions, and keen to see Henry as a godly prince who would destroy idolatry and embrace true religion. Henry had not intended to go so far along that road of reformation, but he ...”

“... Merciless Parliament of 1388, from which Chaucer’s former boss Brembre went to the gallows and Thomas Usk, one of the few people in the period who did mention Chaucer as a poet, to the more dreadful fate of hanging, drawing and beheading – he changed sides (to Chaucer’s) too soon and too prominently. The effect of all this on Chaucer’s ...”

“... Glory was, according to Cash, published in 1945; he refers to the writings of someone called ‘Nicholas Pevesner’. He ruminates on ‘Greene’s very deliberate use of “I” – the first person possessive – ... a narrative device that is itself a bid for possession of Catherine, an act of literary ownership’: this would have been quite clever, if ...”

“... who was on the fringe of my family circle (the best friend of a cousin by marriage), and Nicholas Riasanovsky, a Russian historian. We were to give out money for graduate research projects. I couldn’t call Alexander ‘Onkel Paul’, as I might otherwise have done; ‘Onkel Nick’ was out of the question. And I couldn’t address colleagues as ...”

“... on the left, unshackled from Cold War groupthink: Asli Bâli, Aziz Rana, Jeanne Morefield, Nicholas Mulder, Christy Thornton, Daniel Bessner, Stephen Wertheim, Samuel Moyn et al. Their views share a sense of the incapacity of US force to achieve the lofty objectives invested in it, and their prescriptions range from an immediate moratorium on military ...”

“... of Sir Edmund Backhouse, and concerned with a character no less shadowy and bizarre, the atomist Nicholas Hill. A rogue Catholic and a disciple of Giordano Bruno, Hill seems to have promoted a little-known rebellion on the death of Queen Elizabeth, a doomed and farcical adventure apparently intended to establish, on the unpromising soil of Lundy Island, a ...”

“... for radicals. During this happy exile he spent time with the critic Vissarion Belinsky, and with Nicholas Maier, a liberal who was the model for Werner, the doctor Pechorin meets in A Hero of Our Time. This was the first of three such punitive sentences. He returned to St Petersburg in 1838, where he wrote A Hero of Our Time and his long poem ‘The ...”