“... of magic, and partly to the historical researches of scholars like Frances Yates, D.P. Walker and Peter French. In Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age, John Mebane offers an inclusive, deeply researched overview of the subject. He examines the many component parts of Renaissance occultism. It was, in the spirit of the time, a recovery of ...”

“... figures. He notes that people who have never visited museums feel that there are too many words to read. One is surprised that they were permitted (or could be bothered) to fill in this part of a questionnaire, but their response does at least suggest that some of the less educated members of the public would not appreciate having information about the class ...”

“... was needed, some suggested, was ‘therapeutic coitus’, expressed with total lack of courtesy by Peter of Spain, who believed in applying ‘plasters or women to the testicles’. A good thrashing was Bernard de Gordon’s cure. Others had more civilised ideas. Yet it was never at any time a very civilised area, for all its romantic associations. Wack ...”

“... correspondence: did Molyneux keep the letter out of fear, or pride? There can be no doubt why Peter George Patmore, father of the poet Coventry Patmore, kept the letters in which Hazlitt passionately poured out his rage and jealousy over Sara Walker, the daughter of his boarding-house keeper, ‘who leads a sporting life with everyone who comes in ...”

“... glover. Even here in Canterbury there were other young writers growing up: John Lyly, son of Peter Lyly, clerk to the consistorial court; and Stephen Gosson, a joiner’s son. We have here a miniature blueprint for late Elizabethan theatrical tastes: Marlowe the tragedian, whose thunderous poetry packed them in at the public theatres; Lyly the author of ...”

“... comedy without ever having much fun herself. Rather than a Modesty Blaise in the manner of Sir Peter Lely, a swaggering hedonist from the swinging 1660s, this is an Aphra for the soberly whiggish Nineties. The depressing thing is that Todd is often thoroughly convincing. On Behn’s reputation as a spy, for example, despite the publisher’s promise of ...”

“... sit in front of the television and watch Felicity Kendal in The Good Life. It contains people who read Country Living and worry about overpopulation and resource depletion and their pension funds and the way works of art are leaving Britain, but who don’t worry about the connection between these five things. It contains naturopaths and computer ...”

“... was clearly the fancied candidate for Sunday Times serialisation. Maxwell will hardly care to read that the London Daily News failed for a reason nobody dared tell him, ‘because of its parentage’, or that the portents for his ‘last dash for glory’ are both favourable and ominous. Which dash for glory would that be? He is capable of a good many ...”

“... rich and comfortable middle-class family in Baltimore. She went to high-society schools, where she read Kipling to her boyfriends. She married a young Air Force officer, and became, in her twenties, an important personality in Washington society. Her main male friend outside her collapsing marriage was the Ambassador in Washington of the new Fascist regime in ...”

“... R.H. Robins; and investigate the cultural significance of dictionaries, whether in education (Peter Strevens on Learner’s Dictionaries), in the celebration of a national consciousness (Dr Ramson), in the geographical diffusion of a vocabulary (the admirable Frederic Cassidy on the Dictionary of American Regional English), or in the historical tradition ...”

“... was, deliberately insulated from the highly-charged milieux of the Age of Steam, Soap and Steel. Peter Harman’s new book tries to demonstrate how much metaphysics mattered in the everyday labours of Victorian Britain’s greatest mathematical physicist. Comparisons are odious, but league-tables are another feature of the public life of contemporary ...”

“... was supposedly William Maginn, who retaliated for Bulwer-Lytton’s caricature of him as Peter MacGrawler in Paul Clifford by using his position as editor of Fraser’s Magazine to publish a series of wounding articles about Bulwer-Lytton’s novels. ‘Illustrious Vidocq’, as Bulwer-Lytton called him, was the inspiration for the ambivalent ...”

“... that Aeschylus’ rival Phrynichus was particularly noted for his choreographies, or learn from Peter Wilson in Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy that the shawm (aulos) which always accompanied a performance came in various shapes and sizes depending on the musical context (the ‘wedding shawm’, for example, consisted of one ‘male’ and one ...”

“... in philosophy. He was a friend of Coleridge, and was one of the first people in Britain to read Kant. Kant had written about pure space as a realisation of geometry: it was Hamilton’s attempt to construct a corresponding algebra of pure time that led him eventually to quaternions. Professor Hankins apparently accepts Hamilton’s own assertion that ...”

“... others) have called me a ‘right-wing socialist’ (Michael Foot) and ‘social democratic’ (Peter Sedgwick), perhaps not noticing that I, too, have been on a long journey, affected by Orwell as well as studying him (he does exemplify the non-Marxist ‘English socialist’ tradition, like Tawney, Cole and Foot himself). Many of us have been influenced ...”