“... I think.’ Tite Street was the family home; he did not return there. The spectre of Wilde haunted Henry James in the first two months of 1895, and James’s correspondence gives us a much richer sense than Wilde’s does of what the opening of a new play could mean at the turn of the 19th century. ‘Who shall deny the immense authority of the theatre,’ he ...”

“... Melchior Lorck went to Turkey in 1555 at the height of Suleiman the Magnificent’s power, when the Ottoman Empire stretched from Algeria to the west, Mecca to the south, Baghdad to the east and the River Don to the north, adjoining – and often aggressing – the Habsburgs’ own colossal empire. Suleiman had besieged Vienna twice and, though he had retreated, the threat remained ...”

“... Elizabethan and Jacobean drama ‘Machiavel’ was the stock tag for a personification of evil. In Henry VI Part III, Gloucester vows proleptically to ‘set the murderous Machiavel to school’. In the prologue to the Jew of Malta, ‘Machevill’ boasts of being ‘admired of those that hate [him] most’. ‘A sicke Machiavell Pollititian,’ John Stephens ...”

“... interpretation at the time, Dante takes them as a sign of ‘a predestination decreed by a supreme power’. He had been chosen. Various details in the Vita nova contribute to a false impression of his social status. ‘Dante,’ Santagata writes, ‘refers several times to a “room” of his own where he could go alone to think, to weep, and also to ...”

“... Jasper Heywood, was briefly the leader of the Jesuit mission in England. In 1593 Donne’s brother Henry was arrested for harbouring a priest, and died of the plague in prison; the priest was hanged, drawn and quartered. We don’t know when Donne converted, or why. On Donne’s own account, he made his decision only after he had ‘to the measure of my poore ...”

“... debate.*Johnson, the group agreed, needed a simple message that the public could get behind. Henry de Zoete, a former digital director at Vote Leave and successful Dragon’s Den contestant, suggested advising people to stay at home. Guerin, a New Zealander, noted that ‘stay home, save lives’ had worked well in other parts of the world. Cain proposed ...”

“... over the Black Atlantic were held to show divine displeasure, as in Turner’s The Slave Ship, or Henry Fuseli’s engraving The Negro Revenged, which shows a slave ship being struck by lightning as an African couple exult on a rock. One way of taking these images would be to see them as leaving revenge to God, as required by Romans 12, and reducing slaves to ...”

“... movements. England was the most industrialised country in the world, the one where animal power was least used and where animals were consequently no longer central to production. Yet it was the country where the concern for animals was most developed, expressed in creative literature and art, in concern for animal welfare and in the widespread ...”

“... Turks of 1908, a complete nonsense. ‘I do not think it is easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews,’ the Foreign Office Under-Secretary Lord Robert Cecil said. Segev quotes a character in The Thirty-Nine Steps airing the common prejudice that ‘the Jew is everywhere . . . He’s the man who is ruling the world just now.’ Although ...”

“... animist tenderness in Hughes’s writing, a tenderness that plays against his celebration of feral power. It’s like the last line of a short early poem ‘Snowdrop’ – ‘Her pale head heavy as metal’ – where nature and human artifice come gently together.Inevitably, though, it is biographical interest that these letters stimulate. We catch Hughes’s ...”

“... must have tasted victory in this Whig civic pageant. Crusoe’s occasional moments of exhilarating power and authority – feeling that he is ‘prince and lord of the whole island’ – reflect Defoe’s sense of liberation and his intimacy with state power, first acquired in William’s reign. Crusoe is particularly ...”

“... neighbourhood has allowed him to be quite unembarrassed by his desire for worldly success and power, along with the luxuries that may come with them. It is in his dress rather than his language – Podhoretz’s writing is almost always elegantly phrased and supple, closer to Henry James than to Damon Runyon – that he ...”

“... could be assembled above the rapids, timber could easily be found to burn in the boilers and power the boats; the river and its tributaries could be navigated. The river itself was a rich source of food, with five hundred different kinds of fish, and it helped that the territory which comprised the river basin was not a single kingdom with any form of ...”

“... that no one could approve the remedy ‘unless he approves of cannibalism’. According to Henry of Navarre’s personal physician, a Jewish merchant had expressed revulsion at the practice, marvelling that ‘the Christians, so daintily mouthed, could eat the bodies of the dead’, while Montaigne’s essay ‘Of the Caniballes’ compares the ...”

“... private kind of idiosyncrasy to reveal itself to a public gaze; and a good part of its quiet power comes from the implicit sense of vulnerability which goes along with that sense of exposure. Here, the feeling of vulnerability finds its locus in the stretched-out reader, heedlessly sealed up in the bubble of his unlikely repose. Palmer was always moved ...”