“... personally assured him that he continued to enjoy royal support – an important assurance, since Henry II reversed many of the policies of Francis I within minutes of the latter’s death. Rabelais could go on jesting at tyrants and ignorant monks, championing Evangelical attitudes, defending oppressed Evangelicals from the deadly interests of the ...”

“... usually relevant. Bernard Jocelyn Brooke was born 30 November 1908, third child and second son of Henry Brooke and his wife Mary, née Turner, the youngest of the family by ten years or more. Both his grandfathers had been wine merchants, also his father, who had started life as a solicitor. Brooke’s elder brother, after ten years as a regular officer in ...”

“... whether the prince had successfully slept with Catherine, there would have been no marriage for Henry VIII, thus no divorce and no Reformation.29 May, Yorkshire. I’ve lost count of the number of times on TV I’ve seen the sequence whereby a dead lamb is skinned and the skin fitted onto an orphaned lamb which is then foisted on a bereaved sheep which is ...”

“... was, incidentally, a big Tarka the Otter fan, and once characterised the Oswald Mosley-loving Henry Williamson as a Devonian shaman, ‘a North American Indian sage among Englishmen’.) The man leaves behind a notebook full of poems, which the girls take to the local priest. These poems, which make up the epilogue to Gaudete, turn out to have been ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... became a guide and friend to many enlightened, doubtful readers. It was because of the Elegy that James Boswell would, at difficult times, enjoin himself in his journal to ‘Be Gray.’ In literary history Gray is more often an object of curiosity than of admiration. He is known for having not just one of his poems but his poetic language held up to the ...”

“... in the Promised Land, Britain kept the promise made in 1917 by its Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, in the Declaration that bears his name, ‘to favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. While nurturing the ‘national home’, a term as deliberately vague as Palestinian ‘autonomy’ is today, Britain ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of 3 January 2019): ‘The tattoo remains popular, though bizarrely one person thought it was of Henry Kissinger. It also makes for an amusing conversation during intercourse.’ This suggests the intercourse might be less than fervent, my name in itself something of a detumescent.28 April. The most one can hope from a reader is that he or she should ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Pollock, Dubuffet and Germaine Richier among them. The second, more positive category included Henry Moore, Ceri Richards, William Roberts, Josef Herman, David Bomberg, L.S. Lowry, George Fullard and Frank Auerbach, together with the Dutchman Friso ten Holt. Of these, only the enthusiastic review of Lowry is included in the new collection, which is ...”

“... To begin with, you needed to know a shearling from a gimmer lamb, or hire someone who did. In 1611 Henry Bankes employed two shepherds, Durington and Blackwell, to value some lambs in Yorkshire; it turned out he was overpaying by sixpence a head. Then you had to set your sheep in a pasture, and send someone, perhaps a young servant like Jacob Jackson of ...”

“... the Mail. It was first put on in 1980, and while generally enthusiastic the Mail assumes, as did James Fenton at the time of the first production, that by putting the main young man in drag I am signalling my own (presumably suppressed) desire to get into a frock. It may be that the Mail assumes all homosexuals would like to be in skirts (or ought to ...”

“... the outstanding individual, someone whose outsize talent can carry the weaker players. When LeBron James moves from city to city, the teams he plays for rise and fall with him. Obama was so much more talented than anyone else around – so smart, so eloquent, so cool under pressure – that his teammates must have hoped he could do the same for them. Golf is ...”

“... curly wig’ – but she was paid for the story, and in another instance was convicted of perjury. James Kirchick, in Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington (2022), notes some of the ‘code words and allusive phrases’ that journalists once used to suggest that the ‘nation’s top cop was not the model of American masculinity and traditional ...”