“... Himself.’ Chesterton saw a banner hanging between two tenement houses: ‘God Bless Christ the King,’ it said. From then on an authoritarian Church and a fragile, insecure State combined to produce a sort of dark ages. It was as though Ireland north and south vied with each other over who could produce the most sectarian state. Censorship, mass ...”

“... around from beyond the grave?) A final credit should be given to the admirable illustrations by John Lawrence, which themselves suggest the interesting precedent of Brisley Le Fanu’s wash drawings to accompany Sheridan’s tales. In giving us an additional, visual register against which to check the ambiguities and intimations of the narrative, the ...”

“... Montaigne. To the bonfire with William Hazlitt, closely followed by Max Beerbohm, Sainte-Beuve and John Aubrey. A brusque kiss-off to Francis Bacon, Charles Lamb, La Bruyère and the best of Mencken, not to mention Svetonius’s Lives of the Caesars; and into the garbage goes Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, perhaps the finest book of profile-essays ever ...”

“... were we to need reminding – that a death has meaning. ‘Tragedy, which might be noble,’ John Kerrigan remarks, ‘always, just the same, means waste’; as though some imagined economy has gone awry. Either there’s an anomaly in the system, or there’s no system. What happened at Dunblane is called a tragedy because we take it for granted that ...”

“... Islamic studies was confined to a relatively small number of specialists. There is undoubtedly, as John Esposito, editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia, states in his Preface, a need for an ‘easily accessible major reference work’ in which students, journalists and political analysts can find ‘readily available and succinct information on contemporary Muslim ...”

“... Parliament, they bellowed ‘Go back to Jamaica’ and were much admired in the suburbs for their John Bull spirit. The Communist Party, which was strong on the docks in those times and had the famous Jack Dash as its hate-figure, took the day off and later tried to organise a conciliatory East End meeting addressed by the concerned priesthood. But this is to ...”

“... The 1949 meeting was held at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Woodward arranged for John Hope Franklin, a Black historian who had just published From Slavery to Freedom, a pioneering survey of African American history, to deliver a paper. But where would Franklin sleep and eat? Woodward facetiously suggested that Franklin bring along a ‘pup ...”

“... United States who are wedded to less egalitarian premises. Confident of the obvious fairness of John Rawls’s ‘difference principle’, which states that inequalities are not to be abolished but arranged so that they are of the greatest benefit to the least advantaged, philosophers like Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge have sought to apply Rawls’s theory ...”

“... Six Gallery was hardly virgin territory. The space had once been a community art venture called King Ubu, operated by the Black Mountain poet Robert Duncan and his collagist partner Jess Collins. Duncan, removing his clothes at the conclusion of his verse play Faust Foutu, in order to demonstrate the meaning of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the ...”

“... thought Kemble ‘a whole stock company in herself’. Henry James, who recalled hearing her read King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a boy in London, professed himself still waiting some forty years later ‘for any approach to the splendid volume of Mrs Kemble’s “Howl, howl, howl!” in the one, or to the animation and variety that she ...”

“... with titles like ‘The Nameless Little Flower’ or ‘The Dream of the White Cloud’. Like John Clare, he found his poems in the fields and wrote them down. ‘I heard a mysterious sound in nature,’ he later said. ‘That sound became poetry in my life.’ He wrote that his ‘earliest experience of the nature of poetry’ was a raindrop. His ...”

“... foreigners with his high status. He returned to a troubled England, where his patron the king was already thinking of a new marriage which would provide him with an heir. In 1529, on a visit to the Sorbonne, Pole made the case to the university for Henry’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon, and made it successfully; it was a success he would later ...”

“... gang up on their targets. Phillips details the case of a Californian teenager called Chelsea King, who was raped and murdered in February 2010. Her relatives were treated as fair game, and supportive strangers who tried to intervene were themselves tracked down and hounded. RIP trolling treats grief as an exploitable state. It isn’t that the trolls ...”

“... Belle Ferronnière, Virgin and Child with St Anne, the first version of Virgin of the Rocks and St John the Baptist. A new insight into his activity was provided by the publication in 1651 of his so-called Treatise on Painting, a work produced after his death by combining different passages from his notebooks. Largely thanks to his fame the text was frequently ...”

“... said to have put out the eyes of fifteen thousand Bulgarian warriors and sent them back to their king, guided by the men, just one in a hundred, who had been blinded in only one eye (the atrocity may be authentic, but the numbers are certainly too high). It was also under Basil that the Venetians received favourable trading status in Constantinople in return ...”