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“... In December 1501 the Scottish poet William Dunbar received £5 from the Court of King James IV, a payment which was given to him, according to the Treasurer’s accounts, ‘eftir he com furth of Ingland’. It is not known for sure what he had been doing there. He may well have been in the entourage of the Scottish embassy which was conducting the negotiations with Henry VII that led to the marriage two years later of Princess Margaret Tudor to James IV ...”

“... degree of apprehension about leaving ‘the comforts and quiet’ of the family seat at Hengrave Hall. By 9 June, when Gage set off for Harwich, the allies knew that Napoleon was with the Armée du Nord and manoeuvring for battle. On the 15th Gage was in Amsterdam, making a few cautious aesthetic judgments. ‘The old church … has three very fine painted ...”

“... which he worked for more than two decades. It would be easy to identify Parks with his anti-hero, James, who observes the chaos and corruption around him but does little to try and change things. Parks anticipates this conflation in his prologue, guessing that the reader will say ‘That’s Parks,’ but adds that he has mixed fact and fiction. The ...”

“... Paul of Tarsus, they call themselves Paul when they are not Paul, Peter when they are not Peter, James when they are not James, Jude when they are not Jude. Sometimes they put in circumstantial detail to make their claims more plausible: so pseudo-Paul tells his gullible readers ‘I, Paul, write this greeting with my own ...”

“... eyeballs defocus. He grins with browning teeth. ‘There we are at the cashier’s desk in the hall, poor old Mossy O’Brien and myself, I’d been painting the whole week. Bags on the mat. The pony and trap outside on the gravel waiting to take us off to the GS&WR for Dublin. Behind the counter, in her black bombazine and gold chains, old Ma ...”

“... shows him at his imperious peak, strutting among the luminaries as they make their way through the Hall of Mirrors and the Gallery of Great Battles to a candlelit table the length of a small runway. Most of the guests, including Jeff Bezos, look a little uncomfortable, unsure whether to gawp or pose. But Ghosn is clearly in his element. And just in case anyone ...”

“... the Nobel Peace Prize he delivered a dazzling sermon repeatedly interrupted by cheers; outside the hall, hundreds of college students silently held torches in the snow. The new spirit of the era ran from the students in Oslo saluting the brave civil rights marchers in Birmingham, Alabama, whose leaders, in turn, invoked Mahatma Gandhi and non-violence in ...”

“... decades wear on, we see a boom in high culture at the expense of its vulgar relation, the music hall: the rise and rise of the Hazards, in fact, and the fall of the Chances, who are song-and-dance girls. Told by Dora Chance, a marvellously vivacious old ruin who is at her best when she is, as she says, ‘drunk in charge of a narrative’, Wise Children ...”

“... number of the 47 novels to print. A new and complete edition of the letters (edited by N. John Hall) is about to take over from Bradford Booth’s handy but imperfect single volume. A new and definitive biography (by Hall again) is in hand. And there has been an astonishing number of monographs and hardbacked collections ...”

“... with similar impatience to the list of phobias drawn up by the American psychologist Stanley Hall. Hall had managed to find 132. In Freud’s thinking about phobia there is a consistent emphasis on the scale and density of the precautions erected against danger. Phobia’s anticathexis, he observed, takes the shape of ...”

“... I am become like a bottle in the smoke; yet do I not forget thy statutes’ in the King James version. In more modern versions, ‘I am like a wineskin shrivelled by smoke’; or ‘Though I am shrivelled like a leather flask in the smoke’; or ‘I am useless as a discarded wineskin.’ The notion seems to be that without God the psalmist or his ...”

“... have to be mad to work on this subject matter – but it helps. Just a few moments examining James Tilly Matthews’s beautifully executed pen-and-wash drawing of the ‘air loom’ he believed to be the cause of his psychosis was enough to transport me into the crepuscular realm of the seriously disturbed, but the works of contemporary artists ...”

“... The fire station owes the preservation of its lettering to the vigilance of a printing historian, James Mosley, and an architectural historian, Andrew Saint; and to the fact that the building is still a fire station. When the clothing store Simpson of Piccadilly became a Waterstone’s bookshop a more painful battle of badges took place. Inside, mounted on an ...”

“... in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less perilous, I would have ...”

“... travels along paths ‘strewd with Rubies thicke as gravell’ to arrive at ‘Heavens bribeles hall/ Where noe corrupted voyces braule’. Ralegh’s ‘Nymph’s Reply’ to Marlowe’s ‘Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ combines imaginative description of delicate beauties with destruction and loss: Thie belt of strawe, and bedds of roses, Thie ...”