“... a much more potent and present threat to English religion and government. The intelligence agent William Herle wrote that Philip II, the king of Spain, hated English Protestants ‘with an immortal hatred never to be reconciled, esteeming them worse than either Turks, Marranos, Jews, or Infidels, the blasphemers of God’s holy name and of his son Jesus ...”

“... only friend Achak is surprisingly reunited with. His two best friends from Marial Bai, Moses and William K., both of whom he believes to be dead, cross his path again: William K. a few weeks after leaving Marial Bai; Moses at Pinyudo. Moses was not killed by the murahaleen, as Achak believed, but taken captive and sold ...”

“... The absurdity of the Gothick was captured and its pretensions crisply punctured by Jane Austen and Thomas Love Peacock, but reality was often stranger than anything that even the most fetid literary imagination could come up with. Nothing could have been odder, more menacing or even more prophetic – when viewed with hindsight – than the Broken Column built ...”

“... soon took up with the British security services too. The head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, William Melville, worked closely with the Okhrana’s top man in Paris, Petr Ivanovich Rachkovsky, whose many state-sanctioned crimes probably included overseeing the creation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Morris thinks Melville wasn’t to know about ...”

“... and he left no diaries or memoir. Further confusing matters was Crane’s first biographer, Thomas Beer, whose Stephen Crane: A Study in American Letters (1923) had two virtues and one substantial demerit. The virtues were a carefully written introduction by Joseph Conrad, which treated Crane as a major writer, and Beer’s lively and vigorous ...”

“... is the earliest true crime play on record. It dramatises the violent death of a Kentish landowner, Thomas Arden, in 1551. He was stabbed and bludgeoned in his own parlour during a game of ‘tables’ or backgammon. His killers were in the pay of his wife, Alice, who was adulterously involved with a tailor called Mosby. The title page of the 1592 quarto trails ...”

“... had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him. Biography now belongs to the margins of historical writing. The economic and sociological determinism of the 20th century has questioned the influence of great men, while its ...”

“... the Merchant Adventurers, which led to his making the acquaintance of a fellow guildsman called Thomas Cromwell. Vaughan rose to a degree of professional eminence on Cromwell’s coat-tails, beginning in the years when Cromwell himself was merely a protégé of Thomas Wolsey. Together they helped Wolsey dissolve ...”

“... Dr Davis’s book is a long, careful and detailed study of utopian writing in England from Sir Thomas More to the end of the 17th century. He has interesting things to say about well-known figures like More, Bacon, Winstanley and Harrington, but I found his chapters on lesser writers even more instructive. Robert Burton and Samuel Gott are revealed as more significant ‘utopians’ than has been recognised ...”

“... to exterminate than to encourage’ them. In a penitential composed around 1216, the theologian Thomas Chobham complained about contortionists, professional flatterers and musicians who went to drinking establishments and inflamed their listeners with obscene songs. (He was kinder to entertainers who sang of saints and princes and comforted the sad and the ...”

“... 4. plants the seeds of voluntarism in the doctrine of faith’. In England, the great theologian William Perkins followed Beza (Chapter Four, passim). All predestinarian theologians have to face the problem of how one can be assured of salvation. For Calvin, faith comes only from without, as a divine gift; assurance and faith are in effect the same ...”

“... Edward IV accepted a fraudulent pedigree that gave them as ancestor a man who had come over with William the Conqueror, to whom was assigned the gloriously Saxon name of Wulstan. Clement did, however, have enough money to send his son, William, to train as a lawyer; and William’s ...”

“... but my grandfather’s questions were echoed in the Picture Post of 9 October 1948. John Ormond Thomas, a staff journalist, had made inquiries at Roquebrune and ‘despite close questioning and examination of all the people who should have been able to produce conclusive proof’ he was ‘still not convinced’ of the identity of the body in the ...”

“... does, and the edifice collapses. In order to coincide with the opening of the movie, one suspects, William Cash’s The Third Woman appears to have been rushed into print. He was burrowing around in the archives at Georgetown University only last summer, and the idea for a book about Greene’s relationship with Catherine Walston occurred to him as recently as ...”

“... begged for copies of Barbara Pym, while Gregory spoke wistfully of Philip Larkin. Denton Welch was William Burroughs’s main intellectual squeeze. Ferlinghetti had high hopes for Jeremy Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s ...”