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“... the edition is an achievement of eye and mind of which any scholar could be proud. Vindolanda lay on the northern frontier of empire. The fort, built and rebuilt over the years, guarded the east-west road now called the Stanegate; this was the front line, until a generation later, when Hadrian had his wall built a dozen miles to the north. The garrison ...”

“... rather than present self-loathing. He might have added that for the supposedly anti-fleshly St Paul, it is the sexual coupling of bodies which symbolises the relationship between Christ and his people, and that in Christian tradition celibacy is meant to be a sacrifice. Since it is no sacrifice to surrender what you regard as worthless, Christian ascetism ...”

“... did eat it suffered bilious, flatulent attacks. After one meal, the painter and Bauhaus teacher Paul Klee, who prided himself on being a good cook, worried that ‘even his worms would leave him’. The man responsible for the Bauhaus’s garlic problem was the Swiss expressionist painter Johannes Itten, a friend of Alma Mahler who had run a private art ...”

“... personality we know very little, is ranked among the greatest of theologians, next only to St Paul and St Augustine. Of his publications, the centrepiece is the dauntingly hefty Summa Theologiae. In its dry, brisk, low-key manner, this formidable compendium of theology, metaphysics, ethics and psychology ranges from Thomas’s celebrated demonstrations of ...”

“... of it – was the core figure for making connections between distinct entities. Metaphor therefore lay close to the heart of the ‘organised response’, connecting everything with everything in a cognitively organised manner, which Richards equated with both poetic excellence and a good critical response to it. That’s why it’s still believed today that ...”

“... much the same evolution as the Labour Party. Up there and out in front stand the enthusiasts (both lay and clerical) of the Church’s own militant tendency; back there in the pews (as in the polling booths) stand, slightly bewildered and bemused, the broad, passive array of the faithful. The most striking omission in Dr Bennett’s comprehensive critique of ...”

“... practice. It is as if we had only the lyrics, without recordings or melodies, of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Joan Baez – and those only in indifferent Portuguese translations. Most of their power and all of their subtlety would vanish. For similar reasons, the troubadours have more often been honoured as cultural pioneers than admired as ...”

“... When Captain Paul Voulet presented his plan for a new expedition to the minister of colonies in January 1898 he was accorded a good reception. He was, after all, a promising young officer whose previous mission to French Sudan had shown exemplary firmness towards the natives, and only a few months earlier the president of the republic, Félix Faure, had given him an audience ...”

“... and Edwardian ‘antis’ were far from being advocates of what Marx’s indolent son-in-law Paul Lafargue called ‘the right to be lazy’. Anyone hoping to uncover a hidden history of female hedonism will have to look elsewhere. The antis thought women should work from dawn till dusk for the public weal – but without the tools men had to ...”

“... of his military commander and his law officers, decreed martial law in the county where Morant Bay lay, but excluded the town of Kingston. Although the uprising was put down within a week, in the month that passed before the decree expired the military was allowed an orgy of shooting, flogging and more or less arbitrary executions. The Cornhill Magazine put ...”

“... about predestination; Calvinists (like his mother) needed to persuade themselves that salvation lay in doing God’s work in this life. Radkau and others suggest that Weber would also have been affected by William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, which also appeared in 1902, not least by James’s suggestion that ‘the real core of the ...”

“... may be especially instructive when they don’t concern literal ghosts. ‘It is impossible to lay the ghost of a fact,’ Marlow says in Lord Jim, a little before Stephen Dedalus starts his discussion in a Dublin library – only four years before, if we think of the 1904 setting of Ulysses rather than the time of the writing of the remark. I’m pretty ...”

“... at the moment he became a monument: there are those he counted as friends (Gertrude Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre) and those he had little time for (André Gide, Jean Cocteau); there’s his wrangling with dealers and gallerists; there’s his involvement with the Communist Party, which he joined in 1944, because one ‘goes to the fountain’; there’s his wit ...”

“... a teddy bear, that bridge inner and outer worlds, are held onto with corresponding intensity, and lay the basis for the infant’s encounters with culture. No one minds lending a friend an egg-whisk, but that’s my book, many people insidiously feel, when someone borrows a well-thumbed text (a text in which the reader has palpably invested their ...”

“... been reissued recently by Penguin, in hardback and with new introductions. It follows the hapless Paul Pennyfeather, who, expelled from Oxford for a misdemeanour he did not commit, wanders through an unsuccessful career as a schoolmaster before becoming engaged to the grand and wealthy Margot Beste-Chetwynde. As it happens, her riches derive principally from ...”