“... Oxford meeting, she writes, ‘a fine House was whipped up to vote for the honour. The dons at St John’s were simply told “the women are up to something in Convocation; we have to go and vote them down.”’ Lipscomb reports that she got only three votes besides her own, but the position of righteous defiance suited her. At the end of the pamphlet, she ...”

“... Winchester as a scholar, but Edward was thought to be dim and was dispatched to Kingswood (founder John Wesley), where his father had been. It was an odd time in the public schools, major and minor. At Kingswood there was a small, flourishing Communist cell, including E.P., Arnold Rattenbury, who went on to edit the Communist cultural journal Our Time, and ...”

“... But FDR was certainly no systematic thinker. Asked to define his philosophy, he said: ‘I’m a Christian and a Democrat – that’s all.’ Turn-of-the-century Progressivism provided Roosevelt with much of his intellectual baggage, but he travelled light, picking up what he needed along the way. He was a pragmatist and an experimenter; his life was shaped ...”

“... his own implementation of them than from their exaggeration by his clerical lieutenants, not least John Cosin at Peterhouse, a college where Laudianism ‘had run riot’ (and on which Trevor-Roper bestows the benefit of his analogical instinct, for it ‘was then, as now, a very small college’, where ‘conversation at the high table may not have been very ...”

“... and security, that we can recognise how weird those years really were. The importance of John Lewis Gaddis’s book is that it is the first coherent and sustained attempt to write the Cold War’s history since it ended. That alone makes it hard to resist, but it is also wise and imaginative and written in a vigorous, simple English which is a ...”

“... if frequently unreadable – recent study (with facing translation) of Plautus’ Asinaria by John Henderson. Henderson explores, or dances around, Plautus’ representation of power relationships between sons, fathers, women and slaves. For Henderson, Plautus is both hilariously funny (‘it’s all a gas’: ridicula res est) and a biting social ...”

“... an express elevator. It is a cultivated essence of shop-window shrines and Pentecostal chapels (John Wesley with tambourines, lugubrious and off-pitch). Its own particular harsh pure green is raised and reinforced until it becomes an architecture. It is to green what a snowball is to white, an impactment. Although Brainard was raised a Methodist, these ...”

“... long life. On the one hand, there was the solid evidence provided by the longevity of the early Christian desert fathers – hunger artists who were supposed to eat only enough to keep life going – while, on the other, the ‘theory’ implied by the image of the candle was that the lower the flame, the longer the candle lasted. And so Caloric Restriction ...”

“... his image as a ‘loveable, fantastical Jewish genius from Vitebsk’ (Clement Greenberg)? Crypto Christian or too Jewish? During the last decades of his life, Chagall was among the most public of public artists. He created murals for New York’s Metropolitan Opera and painted the ceiling for the Paris Opera; his mosaics embellished the First National Bank ...”

“... has become everything. This is a man who has written just as convincingly on Don DeLillo as on John Donne, on Kazuo Ishiguro as on Joachim of Flora. But then this is one way of thinking of his special gifts as a critic. Nothing is a ‘field’ for him, there are no fences or trees in the way. The main army can camp anywhere; the avant-garde can camp ...”

“... am suspicious of, the possession theory. This story goes that the addict is like any other poor Christian, but he’s been taken by the devil. His addiction is not something he could choose (after all, it certainly isn’t something he would choose), and therefore he can’t be blamed for it. Unsurprisingly, some finessing of the notion of blame often takes ...”

“... peace was embraced by thinkers who, in the early 16th century, included men like the theologian John Colet, Thomas More and their presiding genius, Erasmus. In England, policymakers bought into the idea of peace for pragmatic reasons as much as out of ideological conviction. As Henry VII’s former minister Edmund Dudley put it in 1509, in a treatise ...”

“... Spanish archival material, Economic Relations between Nazi Germanyand Franco’s Spain (1996) by Christian Leitz and Franquismo y Tercer Reich (1994) by Rafael García Pérez, though the latter focuses on the period of the Second World War. The topic is also covered in nearly all of the major histories of the Spanish Civil War. It is simply wrong to ...”

“... in His Study. Here, a Sicilian artist working in Venice in the mid-1470s represents the early Christian saint in the nonpareil of home offices. St Jerome sits reading at his desk on an elevated podium; other books and artefacts line the shelves around him. The architecture is lofty, gothic and fantastical. Framing the scene is a stone archway with a ...”

“... Riders, the first book he appears in. His fiancée, Helen, spends all her savings on an Augustus John drawing of a horse for his wedding present. She gives him it, goes to answer the doorbell, and when she comes back fifteen minutes later finds him looking at the drawing with satisfaction. ‘That’s better.’ ‘What?’ said Helen. Then, noticing a ...”