“... seems to have been a belief that temptation, particularly sexual temptation, fades as nearness to death increases. Also, wisdom should have been acquired by the old, and should lead to virtue. St Bernard went further and held that since the old should have arrived at wisdom and virtue, a young man, by achieving these, could be old in the ‘true’ sense of ...”

“... and what ought to have been done with it. Then they have to face her preoccupation not only with death but with the grave, and the sensation of lying, remembered or forgotten, under the turf. There was, too, a sardonic Christina, whose comment on art and life was this: The mangled frog abides incog, The uninteresting actual frog: The hypothetic frog alone ...”

“... weeping over, and partly because those who fall from a lofty height make a greater splash. The death of a princess has complex consequences in society as a whole; the death of a chauffeur does not. In a democratic age, by contrast, the ranks of potential tragic protagonists have swollen immeasurably. Anybody plucked from ...”

“... the bolt hole Turner the famous painter had in the character of Turner, common-law husband of Sarah Danby and father of two daughters by her, or, later, Turner, alias Booth (sometimes Admiral Booth), common-law husband of Mrs Booth in Chelsea. His domestic relations with these women are undocumented. Negligible provision was made for them in his various ...”

“... which is Royal Ballet-speak for asked to leave. ‘At assessment time everyone’s so stressed,’ Sarah, a former student there told me. ‘Everyone stops eating.’ (This isn’t just nerves. As the school’s guidance on eating disorders puts it, ballet dancers are ‘aesthetic athletes’ whose appearance ‘is a part of their performance’.) In any ...”

“... to the left of the headword. Murray’s successors William Craigie and Charles Onions tussled over whether to maintain this practice. Proofs of the Supplement dated 11 September 1929 retain Murray’s so-called tramlines; in the next proofs, dated 2 July 1930, they are gone. Between these dates, Onions joined the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, where he became acutely aware of the prejudices that led some people to stigmatise new or imported terms; tramlines, he felt, didn’t help ...”

“... to Moses [son of Maimon] there was none like Moses’ began to circulate shortly after his death. And then there is his Arabic name: Musa ibn Maymun ibn’Abdallah al-Qurtubi al-Andalusi al-Isra’ili (Moses son of Maimon son of Abdallah the Cordoban the Andalusian the Israelite), a name that announced he was a Jew born in and exiled from Muslim ...”

“... point of entering the lists she does not yet appear to be regarded as a mistake of the calibre of Sarah Ferguson and Diana Spencer.The latter prompts Tina Brown to remark: ‘What a pity that the queen, so gifted at reading the bloodlines of horses, misread so profoundly the Spencers’ suitability to join with royal stock. Yes, in terms of pedigree, they ...”

“... on how best to irritate people, An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753). After her death in 1755 it was considered a shame that she hadn’t tried writing something less rebarbative. Her younger brother Arthur ‘often lamented’, the 1804 editor of the Essay recalled, ‘that a sister possessing such amiable manners, and such ...”

“... with which Whedon investigated the emotional consequences of bad sex, the corporeal horror of a death in the family, small-town blood-sucking junkies and so on, are all a bit post-watershed BBC2 – Davies appears to have learned from Buffy’s post-Freudian way with a metaphor, finding the darkness and grandeur in everyday situations, animating and so ...”

“... in this language, there is no other source of mercy. She seems more pious in Irish and also more death-minded. The crick in her neck is a ‘camreilig’, meaning a twist or crook of the grave. There is nothing forced about the pathos and, in the lyricism, no sense of reach.Willie, played by Raymond Keane, crawls around the mound, grunting superbly, and I ...”

“... The story, as my grandmother always told it, was that her grandfather was pushed to his death down a liftshaft in Florence for the sake of his gold watch. It never occurred to me to wonder whether or not this was true. The events it related were too remote – a great-great-grandfather a hyphen too far. My grandmother’s grandfather was pushed to his death down a liftshaft in Florence for the sake of his gold watch in much the same way that Troy fell to a large wooden horse packed with Greeks ...”

“... back from one such dot on the map with what remained of a man who seemed to have been beaten to death, or near it, by more than one person. The victim had been an outsider, someone who’d turned up in town a few months earlier and got a job in the local pub. The story of his accidental fall was corroborated by everyone in the town and made no sense at all ...”

“... portraits from the whims and vagaries of ‘temporary fashion’. By the time of Reynolds’s death in 1792, ‘that bedgown’ had become the very height of fashion. The ‘robe à la grecque’, ‘empire style’, ‘neoclassical dress’ swept away the remnants of panniers and stomachers. Frankland’s watercolour for 1793 captured the vogue for long ...”

“... sent between the Nashes and Carrington, and discovered in a trunk in a bread-oven after John’s death. Blythe edits deftly and writes at once intimately and with a feel for the broad historical pulse, and the text is illustrated with irresistible, virtuoso ‘Here’s me: and here’s how I see you’ comic pen drawings from the correspondents. In contrast ...”