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“... and, occasionally, terror. Halley’s comet appears on the Bayeux Tapestry as a harbinger of King Harold’s doom. It was probably first spotted by the ever-watchful Chinese. In 840 AD an imperial edict in China forbade astronomers to mix ‘with civil servants and common people in general’ lest their knowledge of these terrible objects incite popular ...”

“... febrile fits which were produced in the savant Erasmus at the sight of a plate of lentils? . . . King James II trembled at the sight of a naked sword: and the sight of an ass, if the chronicle of the time can be believed, sufficed to cause the Duke of Epernon to lose consciousness.’ Other stalwarts included Hobbes (fear of darkness), Pascal (fear of ...”

“... canes, ‘hounds of the Lord’. The other major grouping among the friars, the followers of Francis, also staffed inquisitions but, as Black points out, Franciscans rapidly lost their already minority share of the inquisitor market during the 16th century. So there were inquisitions long before there was the Inquisition. And in fact there never was ...”

“... flight to Varennes. Nor should he have been, for Part One was published several months before the king fled and Paine was manhandled. According to Hitchens, Part Two was produced partly to explain to Dr Johnson the need for a written constitution, and partly to endorse Ricardo’s views on commerce and free trade, but when it was written Johnson had been dead ...”

“... air of Artifice, bottom perched – very hesitantly – on the disconnected image-complex … As Francis Ponge puts it, ‘le seul moyen d’agir est le moyen que j’ai choisi: d’écrire.’In his introduction Gareth Farmer points out that what Ponge actually wrote was ‘le seul moyen d’agir et non d’être agi’: writing is the only way to act and ...”

“... often included figurative and allegorical representations: ‘The “chemical wedding” of solar king and lunar queen might represent the alchemical process of conjunction – the physical joining of gold and silver – or suggest an analogy for the mysterious and unseen bonds between substances, now envisioned in terms of human desire.’ Naked men and ...”

“... of which H. sap can conceive remain unfulfilled,’ but Reading is more like Betjeman than Francis Bacon, and he convinces you that he is neither subconsciously attracted to the degradations he describes nor writing from the standpoint of ‘beetrooty colonels’ who want ‘to get this Great Country back on its feet’. A difficult balancing act, but ...”

“... the only new recruit made in the 20th century to the first rank of Old Masters was (as the late Francis Haskell pointed out) Georges de La Tour, whose brilliantly lit pickpocket and solemn, candlelit Magdalen both derive from Caravaggio’s inventions. The reassessment of Caravaggio was in part due to the advent of loan exhibitions, to the cleaning and ...”

“... piece of parchment drawn up when Catherine the Great was Empress of All the Russias and George III King of England. The Founding Fathers, wise in their generation, could not foresee Hot Lines, B52s and the social security system, but they knew that they had created an office that might be dangerous to liberty. Hence they hedged it round as best they could with ...”

“... up into rival groups. Lefèvre d’Etaples’s Biblical studies won him the support of the French King’s sister, Margaret, and ought to have made him a natural ally of Erasmus. He was soon at Erasmus’s throat. I ‘treat Christ with contumely’, Erasmus exploded. He picked over Lefèvre’s worst insults in a letter addressed to Guillaume Budé (who had ...”

“... ethnicity and whatever the quality of the dynasty’s representative at any given moment. Emperor Francis I would never have been chosen as a leader by any electoral body. Keates opens his book with the story of the Bandiera brothers. Italian officers in the Austrian navy, Attilio and Emilio Bandiera became fervent patriots, tried to lead an insurrection and ...”

“... a single non-royal person was common, even commoner than either genuinely personal monarchy, the king his own minister, or conciliar, collegial government. The question why this should have been so also yields answers which may apply to many, even most cases. The most obvious explanation might seem to be pathological: the personal inadequacy of monarchs who ...”

“... came to Buckingham Palace in 1945 to present a loyal address at the end of World War Two, the king asked who these people were. ‘Some call them Quakers, Your Majesty.’ ‘Oh,’ the king said. ‘I didn’t know that there were any of them left.’ According to the protocols of sociologists of religion, the Quakers ...”

“... is, as I write, ranked 271 in Amazon’s UK sales list (41 in the US), while the Arden edition of King Lear is ranked 13,791 (309,493 in the US). People are a lot more likely to buy books about Shakespeare’s life than they are to buy books by Shakespeare. The money generated in this way never gets through to Mr Shakespeare, of course, though he did well ...”

“... in Venice some time around Hanukkah in 1523. Calling himself ‘son of Solomon and brother to King Joseph’, ruler of the lost tribes of Reuben, Gad and Manasseh that dwelt in the far east of myth, beyond the Sambatyon (‘a river so Jewish it observed the Sabbath’), David sought (and even more surprisingly received) audiences with Pope Clement VII and ...”