“... his weekly school letter and gave it to the headmaster to read, revise and encypher. Professor Nicholas, the editor, fawns and bows, proclaims those despatches written in Berlin’s absence to be ‘school of Berlin’: but he cannot get away from the fact that, deprived of the right to portray personalities, express opinions, or be funny, Theseus puts up ...”

“... to publish a definitive, ten-volume edition of Burke’s correspondence, supervised by the late Thomas Copeland. And since 1981, the Clarendon Press has been publishing Burke’s writings and speeches under the overall editorship of Paul Langford, the first systematically new edition since that compiled between 1792 and 1827. No one reading these genuinely ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for the English ones, though when visitors beat a path to his door they weren’t always welcome. Nicholas Zurbrugg came for three days, leaving Finlay ‘not only exhausted but somehow furious at all such people’. Anathemas were pronounced. Harold Cohen was ‘never to be mentioned again. He is an ignorant person’, Donald Davie was a ‘wretch’, and ...”