“... fans. ‘You would have thought I’d kidnapped the Lindbergh baby, the way some of the letters read,’ he said. Even the papers went for him after he played badly in his first All-Star Game, the mid-season showpiece between the best players in the American and National Leagues. He decided he had to look after himself. He was no fool. Even Joe DiMaggio ...”

“... approach here is to cut the Vikings down to size. This is the method associated with the name of Peter Sawyer and it has brought some striking and happily controversial results. An alternative is to exploit hitherto neglected types of evidence, in particular royal charters, in order to look more closely at the work of earlier kings, both in Mercia (after ...”

“... of powerful loyalty and affection with irritation and ridicule. ‘Let’s make ILEA sillier,’ read a badge, now a collectors’ item, produced by an enterprising bunch of ILEA headteachers during an in-service training course. The reasons for this paradox are many and complex, but there are two major ones. The first relates to an awareness of the sheer ...”

“... communal games and simple amusements. But while he was still an undergraduate, he was invited to read a paper to the Moral Sciences Club, an unusual honour, and his subject was ‘Mathematics and Logic’. In 1935, at the age of 22, he was elected to a research fellowship at King’s, also an unusual recognition of his potentialities. His early achievements ...”

“... if in a floral arrangement, commissioned by pious ladies of the city: the long bones arranged to read as glorifying legends, the shoulder-blades in rosettes, the skulls in columns wearing embroidered visors in purple and gold (now rather dusty). All these will be gathered, sorted and reclothed in flesh. Jacopus da Voragine imagines the martyr James the ...”

“... Colored Orphan Asylum; elsewhere, blacks were lynched and their property destroyed. The novelist Peter Quinn has identified this moment as crucial for the Irish: it was a fight between two disadvantaged groups to see who was going to wind up bottom of the heap. The Irish won but, judging by Bainbridge Avenue, the war is not over. Though undoubtedly the ...”

“... Even so, it’s odd that Cecil Beaton should have decided that she might be his. Odd, until you read Souhami’s description of the world Beaton created at his farmhouse, Ashcombe, in Wiltshire. ‘He filled the place with lifesized cupids, silver and gilt candlesticks, silver bird cages, glass balls, engraved mirrors, shell pictures, crumbling Italian ...”

“... it is the familiar tale with black sauce. The editor’s warning that the letters should be read for entertainment not truth is perhaps superfluous. In this feast of irresponsibility she is ready to puncture with a neat footnote the more wounding nonsenses. She cannot let Mitford get away with imputing ‘intense cowardice’ to Lady Derby for not ...”

“... for a past homeland experienced at a distance and in conditions of relative ease. More often we read of poverty, distrust, conflict, self-doubt and legal insecurity, not only before and during World War Two but after it, in the new forms of persecution called up by the Cold War. This book is ungainly. It does not promise or perform completion ...”

“... he adjusted the measurements upwards. He thought it impregnable but was proved wrong by his tenant Peter the Great, who had come to observe the royal dockyard, and was apparently trundled in and out through the hedge in a wheelbarrow, causing immense damage. I worry about those who pushed him. Read Sylva and Evelyn is before ...”

“... was particularly unimpressed by an unnaturally informative cloth label pasted to the back, which read: ‘Shakspere/Born April 23 = 1564/Died April 23 – 1616/Aged 52/This Likeness taken 1603/Age at that time 39 ys.’ Spielmann doesn’t say so, but it’s hard not to suspect that this label was written to overcompensate for that missing two-inch ...”

“... that his job was being lined up for one of New Labour’s rising stars such as Jack Straw or Peter Mandelson, Cook may indeed have been thinking hard about escape routes to the European Commission or the Scottish Parliament, but that doesn’t mean he was already a busted flush. He did, after all, survive another five years – and when he finally left ...”

“... and ‘rather restless’ horde had come to listen to him preach. Amid the commotion he had to read out a passage from the Gospels twice, ‘for my voice is such that it will only carry in a great silence.’ In the 840s, two men dressed as monks arrived at the church of St Bénigne in Dijon with bones they claimed were relics. (Of which saint they ...”

“... often willing to experiment with highly volatile social materials.’ So the bishops became, in Peter Brown’s striking phrase, impresarios of the sacred. They took the bodies of the saints from their shrines outside the cities, and placed them under the altars of their cathedrals. Rather than a trigger for conflicting pieties, the saint became a centre of ...”

“... an influence on him in his less realist modes); the encounters with bears and goblins in Lapland read like something out of a Scandinavian folk tale. Munthe built his house and his memoir in similar ways, accumulating material from disparate sources – he brought a red granite sphinx from Egypt to glare out over the Bay of Naples, and dredged up from the ...”