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“... another migrant crisis. Xi Jinping has agreed to create a diversion by landing men on the Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea, which causes the government of the Philippines to ask the US to send in an aircraft carrier. Russian forces move on Narva under the pretext of protecting the rights of Russian speakers. When news arrives that the Russian army ...”

“... family betrayal: at first of the inheritance of the broad-church Anglicanism of his famous father, Thomas Arnold; and then – not once, but twice – in the danger to his marriage to Julia, the anti-Catholic he had married in New Zealand. Bernard Bergonzi’s description of Thomas Arnold the Younger as a ‘Victorian ...”

“... Barnett Newman​ was an ‘eminence’ in the postwar art world, Amy Newman (no relation) writes in her exhaustive biography; at the time of his death in 1970 no one in his cohort was more revered. Yet today he is largely forgotten, which is one indication of how much the terms of art have changed ...”

“... his enforced resignation as Tasmania’s inspector of schools, brought him back to Britain and to Newman’s door. Doubtless aware of the propaganda value of recruiting the son and namesake of one of the most powerful earlier enemies of the Oxford Movement, Newman secured for Arnold a professorship of English literature at ...”

“... women to rise above their sex and achieve parity with men. According to the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, ‘every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven’ – a doctrine that transcends even as it reinforces the misogyny of classical culture. The legends of trans monks offer endless variations on a theme. St Pelagia (or Pelagios) had ...”

“... as any other old Etonian from Somersetshire. The text of the leaflet is reprinted in Hugh Thomas’s biography of Strachey published twenty years ago. Thomas told us much more about Strachey the man (cricket, tennis, adoring family, etc) than about Strachey the socialist. This is perhaps because ...”

“... is deployed with deliberately comic or satirical intent. So firm was the hold of classicism that Thomas of Chobham, a noted teacher of homiletics, quotes Plato to prove that a preacher should begin his sermon with a prayer. By far the most influential branch of rhetoric, preaching affords a fascinating example of the relationship between Latin and the ...”

“... cards for the captain’s soul. The temples at Luxor stood under a full moon, lightly boiled. Sir Thomas got off to try and bag a crocodile. The route up from Marseille went as the crow flies – precipitately, a dash from ear to ear. A fellow-traveller let him play with his collar and tie, until he pulled out ‘an excellent English razor’. There was his ...”

“... not only because she appears, with perhaps feigned humility, as a mere ‘creature’. As Barbara Newman shows in her brilliant new book, medieval Christians understood themselves to be interconnected to an extent that would surprise many people today, at least in Western cultures. Their minds and hearts were legible to other people as well as to God and the ...”

“... few hymnodists who have been accepted or half-accepted into the literary canon – George Herbert, Thomas Ken, Watts, Charles Wesley – but many less celebrated names, such as Sir Robert Grant, William Walsham How, William Chatterton Dix: Grant (‘O worship the King, all glorious above’), the Scottish-born English MP who ended his life as Governor of ...”

“... are picked clean and the clean bones gone/They shall have stars at elbow and foot,’ as Dylan Thomas wrote: ‘And death shall have no dominion.’ On the other hand, decaying flesh could transmit the holiness of the soul it once sheltered through contact relics. Dirt from a grave, water in which a saint had been washed for burial, straw from his bed, or ...”

“... with sources. In addition to official documents, chroniclers such as Henry Knighton, Adam Usk, Thomas Walsingham and Jean Froissart wrote detailed narratives, partisan but not of one mind. For obvious reasons, their histories focus on the nobility. Although England was a precociously centralised realm with a sophisticated bureaucracy, it had neither a ...”

“... 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 in its defence ‘like a fierce virago’, wearing a cauldron as a helmet as she ...”

“... from the Middle Ages raises some provocative questions about historical figures. Was Thomas Aquinas truly a glutton, or was he so absorbed in thought that he ate whatever was set before him, without noticing how much? Did Catherine of Siena really think of her notorious (and fatal) anorexia as a ‘philosophy of wellness’? Could Bernard of ...”

“... is required to read them, while scholastic writings are heavily abbreviated to save parchment. Thomas Aquinas’s shorthand was so illegible only his secretary could decipher it. Most remarkable is the prolific 13th-century scholar known as the ‘Tremulous Hand of Worcester’, who glossed Old English manuscripts in Latin and Middle English. His shaky ...”