“... and Müntzer (if he had swallowed the Holy Ghost, feathers and all, you still could not trust him, said Luther); the Visitor, church controller and bureaucrat; and Barrabas, the strident, truculent activist, despoiler of the Church. John King’s copiously documented and appendixed survey is concerned with a time when More and Luther and their trouble were ...”

“... the second was ‘a gloss on the word “lot” in “Whispers of Immortality” ’ (‘he said it meant “kind”, not “fate”, and conceded that it perhaps violated the diction of that particular poem’); ‘the third,’ Kenner reveals, ‘had reference to cheese.’ Hard Cheddar, perhaps? The preliminary matters matter, then, but they are ...”

“... of the Lincoln Brigade. When Hoover complained that three COI employees were communists, Donovan said: ‘That’s why I hired them.’ Hoover referred to COI as ‘Roosevelt’s folly’, while the Goebbels propaganda machine derided Donovan’s ‘Jewish scribblers’.Six months after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt dissolved the unwieldy COI. A new Office of War ...”

“... women must be quarantined like the plague they are’). The necessary result of all this, Rodger said, was his ‘War on Women’, in the course of which he would ‘punish all females’ for the crime of depriving him of sex. He would target the Alpha Phi sorority, ‘the hottest sorority of UCSB’, because it contained ‘the very girls who represent ...”

“... systems around Russia’s borders. It began just over a year ago in Georgia. Mikheil Saakashvili said then that his country would be the first in the post-Soviet zone (the Baltic Republics apart) to follow the path opened by the nations of East and Central Europe 15 years earlier. If the peaceful uprising in Ukraine succeeds (and it is too early to know how ...”

“... right thinking and optimism – an attack on the establishment. Wanted to disturb them,’ he said. ‘I could just hear my father saying: "Why do you want to look at these scenes, they’re depressing. Why don’t you look at the nice things in life?”’ Then, towards the end of his life, when he was teaching photography at Yale, he encouraged his ...”

“... account of that country somewhat nearer the truth than the version of those who took what he said as an apology for Fascism. Nor even that he despised parliamentary politics. After all, the generation before his – Proust, Mann, Joyce, Lawrence, Yeats, Shaw and T.S. Eliot – despised democracy. Nor was Catholicism the mark of a deviant at a time when ...”

“... by freelance contributors. So Max mentioned my name to the appropriate editor, Ralph Hegley, and said that I could write obituaries of philosophers and intellectuals. Hegley asked to have lunch with me. We met at a restaurant in Covent Garden – expensive Italian, snowy tablecloths, steamroom hush, Pompeian ruins of cheese on a silent trolley. We sat at a ...”

“... those of countless other designer-directors, including Roller himself, as well as Jacques Copeau, Edward Gordon Craig and even Stanislavsky. Appia was above all a creature of the age of electricity, and for him the key to intelligent stage production was to have simple, lapidary sets subtly and imaginatively lit; lighting being the essential ingredient, as ...”

“... 81 types of torture in all, from the barbecued St Lawrence to the skinned St Bartholomew, who is said in different versions to have been crucified upside down, flayed alive and beheaded. Jacobus opts for all three. Often it is only after a long series of torments have failed to dispatch a saint that the executioners cut off his head. The litany of holy ...”

“... points out, to insist that Cyrus, too, had been an Achaemenid, though Cyrus himself had never said anything of that sort. Darius became an even more dominant Great King and so, despite the possibly mythical status of Achaemenes, the rulers of the Persian empire became known as the Achaemenid dynasty. That the prize Darius won was worth fighting for hardly ...”

“... the butcher or the cattle.’ Why are there no counterparts to Twilight’s ethical vampire, Edward Cullen? Why are there no vegetarian zombies? (Well, undoubtedly there are some somewhere, but if so, they’ve never caught on.) Many zombies don’t merely want food, they want flesh – in the earlier films, human flesh, and lately any kind of ...”

“... the rank and file, but also to the skills of the medics who treated them. Here is the petition of Edward Bagshaw of Conisbrough, Yorkshire: The petitioner, being a soldier under Major Cole in Sir Philip Berron’s regiment in his late Majesty’s service, did at York receive many wounds and cuts in the head, insomuch that your petitioner had nine bones taken ...”

“... known as ‘evolution’). But he made no great claims to originality. In a letter of 1860 he said that ‘no educated person, not even the most ignorant, could suppose that I meant to arrogate to myself the origination of the doctrine that species had not been independently created,’ adding that ‘the only novelty in my work is the attempt to explain ...”

“... Janda, a peasant, when asked where he obtained the libels he was spreading about the priesthood, said: in the book of a Saxon soldier. He [the parish priest] answered me: That isn’t possible, one cannot understand those books immediately! And me, I proposed to him to give me whatever book he wanted. I would read it to him one time only, and then I would ...”