“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and shares it. And he goes out of his way to provoke it. There is no more relentless pronoun in English-language poetry than Frederick Seidel’s ‘I’. ‘Everything in the poems is true,’ he told New York magazine in 2006. ‘You should take them at face value.’ The de rigueur response to such a claim is provided by ...”

“... leading to a kind of papal absolutism, which some might see as a reasonable description of Richard Dawkins.) Hobsbawm, however, points out that Marx was actually too generous to the bourgeoisie, a fault of which he is not commonly accused. At the time of The Communist Manifesto, their economic achievements were a good deal more modest than he ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... form, and discover by follow-up research that vapulare, the verb in question, crossed over into English as the rare ‘vapulate’, though, when used at all, it tends to mean ‘to flog’ rather than ‘to be flogged’, so confirming the hint that there inheres in the process of verberation / vapulation the possibility of a measure of complicity.) All the ...”

“... gal pal’ takes him by the bespoke elbow and murmurs: ‘This place is kinda nice – English.’ George is holding a copy of that morning’s Los Angeles Times, which reports details of the Rodney King trial. Now for all I know, George is so devoted to South Central LA that he holds a weekly acting workshop in Lynwood, but if he’s anything like ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Contamine’s indispensable survey, War in the Middle Ages, now available in a welcome and clear English translation by Michael Jones, offers us a naming of parts for the study of war: ‘military skill, armament, recruitment, composition and life in the armies, moral and religious problems posed by war, the relationship between war and its political and ...”

“... him to remain hidden, the man in the mask, detached, even disdainful. The walking embodiment of Richard Sennett’s 18th-century public man, Cuvier vigilantly kept up his public front in an age increasingly given over to effusions of Romantic sincerity and authenticity. The real Cuvier thus remains concealed for good behind the smokescreens of ...”

“... epic’. We might also compare him with the hero-villains of Shakespeare, with Brutus, Macbeth or Richard III, raging at the ghosts of their victims. Francis Phelan is not a pathetic old man: he is frightening. When we walk guiltily past the alcoholic tramps of Charing Cross, there are some who seem too degraded to be helped and others who seem too ...”

“... not extend to lesser breeds within Europe, and certainly not beyond. He and the Liberal politician Richard Cobden believed that general amity would be reinforced by free trade and benign capitalism. Socialist thinkers, on the contrary, sought the abolition of capitalism and classes, and eventually of sovereign nations as well. Marx despised the wishy-washy ...”

“... Pope adds in a manuscript comment that he may have had from the struggling poet and hellraiser Richard Savage. In typically tantalising style, Curll alleged in print that the ill-matched babes were ‘Offspring of a Poet and a Bookseller’. The first task for any Haywood biographer, plainly, is to clear away the flak and innuendo. Some years ago, King ...”