“... party to her daughter: a trendy cleric, his dull wife, a long-skirted daughter, going up to read English at Hertford, who evidently hadn’t wanted to come, and Henry James’s manservant (still living in Rye, but with a deaf-aid which had to be plugged into the skirting ) . . . contributing in a loud, shrill voice remarks like ‘Mr Henry was a heavy man ...”

“... her into,’ wrote one member of the all female Co-operative Correspondence Club, who had read English and Modern Languages at Cambridge. Accidia, as she called herself, in reference to the melancholic depression she often suffered, bemoaned the need to spend all her time keeping the ‘horrid little house’ clean when ‘relieved of the inevitability of ...”

“... writ, in response to what they saw as Protestant fundamentalism. As the French Oratorian scholar Richard Simon remarked early on in a book that became a subversive classic among Catholics and Protestants alike, ‘the Books of the Bible that are come into our hands are but abridgments of the ancient Records, which were more full and copious, before the last ...”

“... that when Sir Henry Wyatt, father of the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, was imprisoned in the Tower by Richard III he was fed by a cat which brought him a dead pigeon. In Wolf Hall this piece of family mythology becomes a tale that Sir Henry, on the edge of retirement, relates himself, with a rheumy twinkle of unreliability in his eye. A factually implausible ...”

“... law,’ the US envoy said at the first Pan-American Conference in 1889, ‘than there can be an English, a German or a Prussian international law.’ There was only ‘international law’, whose ‘old and settled meaning’ was defined ‘long before any of the now established American nations had an independent existence’. 10. In other words, American ...”

“... massed choirs and a packed flag-waving audience ruled out on medical grounds,’ Richard Morrison wrote, ‘there will never be a better moment to drop that toe-curlingly embarrassing anachronistic farrago of nationalistic songs that concludes the Last Night of the Proms.’ He was referring to ‘Rule Britannia!’ and ‘Land of Hope and ...”

“... him and her uncle, Raymond of Antioch. Much later, as queen of England, she represented her son Richard I while he was on the Third Crusade. At a humbler rank, the Cistercian monk Thomas of Froidmont wrote a Life of his heroic sister, Margaret of Beverley. Having gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1187 while Saladin was besieging the city, Margaret assisted ...”

“... what was virtually its coup de grâce with the appointment as CDS of an officer. General Sir Richard Vincent, who had never been head of his own Service at all.On the whole the Chiefs have accepted their downgrading with a good grace. They are not fools. The Services themselves take great care to groom for stardom individuals who will do them credit in ...”

“... constituted a growing proportion of the population and why the eminent Presbyterian Richard Baxter was convinced that a large proportion of those ‘born of Christian Parents’ had ‘banished’ faith from their ‘Hearts and Lives’. Often described as ‘worldlings’, these were people who denied God less in thoughts and words than in ...”

“... Dorothy’s Tearooms and King’s Parade. Later, he gives us an inside dopester’s account of the English Faculty Board on which, though exiled to the provinces, he seems to have been sitting for the last thirty years. Inglis seems almost equally besotted with Oxford, and a WEA summer school at Balliol, where Raymond lectured in the Fifties, becomes the ...”

“... think of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of ...”

“... percetive study of three men who died young, the painter Christopher Wood (1901-30), the war hero, Richard Hillary (1919-43), and Jeremy Wolfenden (1934-65) who was (or is?) the most spectacular failure of my Oxford generation. Faulks believes that ‘short lives are more sensitive indicators of the pressure of public attitudes than lives lived long and ...”

“... mainstream and almost out of the blue, by the Frenchman Pierre Legouis. He translated it into English only in 1965, and then in a heavily abbreviated edition. He did not have to change his facts much, for little had been discovered about Marvell’s life in the interim, though the movement to contextualise his writing would begin three years later with ...”

“... government of William Pitt and make peace with the French Republic. Just before the arrests, an English medical student studying in Edinburgh, John Edmonds Stock, had been sent down to London by Watt with a letter to the London Corresponding Society inviting them to mount a similar insurrection. Hearing just in time that he was a wanted man, he ...”

“... the experiment, it remained the ‘most frequently taught’ postwar American novel in the English departments he surveyed. Rampersad adds another list: a curriculum vitae of post-Invisible Man activities that reads like a philanthropist’s rather than a novelist’s obituary. Ellison joined the committee of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as one of its ...”