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“... had, after all, reached its climax in Wales. In the summer of 1399, the shattering deposition of Richard II, the ultimate de jure monarch of the old medieval order, removed the last king of Britain who ruled by undisputed hereditary right. Enough princely blood ran in Glyn Dŵr’s veins to lend a certain legitimacy to his title and to the revolt mounted in ...”

“... In the closing stages of Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of Joe DiMaggio there is an exchange between the baseball legend and a man called Cappy Harada for whom DiMaggio had done a bit of business. The episode is undated in the book, but took place some time before the San Francisco earthquake of 1989, at which time DiMaggio was 74 ...”

“... commitment to musical polyphony was bound to set him at odds with the culture of the concert hall and the piano business. The musical repertoire best suited to that culture, because specifically written for it, is one in which polyphonic values are suppressed in favour of drama and virtuoso display. Gould found this music uninteresting and aesthetically ...”

“... it has to be admitted that there is not much left of the carcase of Pirenne’s thesis. Yet, as Richard Hodges says, it obstinately refuses to disappear. If one reason for this is that economists never agree, another, as he also says, is that the very sparseness of the evidence leaves almost infinite room for argument: we have, for example, no early ...”

“... to another. The Lasts live on a ‘nice little estate’ and their house has an oak-panelled hall which is the diarist’s especial pride. They run a car until mid-1942. So far, so ordinary. Mrs Last busies herself mightily to raise funds for hospital supplies and prisoner-of-war parcels, and later helps in a canteen. The assiduity with which she ...”

“... by warders and barbed wire, and a life-sized doll hanging from a chandelier. In the entrance hall, rows of prosthetic eyeballs are fixed to the wall. The agents opened the door with a crowbar and, according to federal prosecutors who spoke to the New York Times, ‘seized photographs of nude underage girls’. Evidence has been piling up that Epstein was ...”

“... was founded on a crime (he deposed, imprisoned and some would say caused the death of his cousin Richard II, who had once been his playmate). Caught between self-command and the most crushing self-doubt, Walter knew how to rise to this part and bring it down in the same breath. The king is wan with care and insomnia – he is guilty. He is also ...”

“... remembered for its illustrations by A.S. Forrest, a succession of poignant tableaux like a village hall pageant. The Thames underwrites a narrative of royal escapes, murdered princelings, futile rebellion. Richard II is rowed downstream to confront Wat Tyler and his peasant army. Unable to call on anything as formidable as ...”

“... was a man of modern outlook, if only in certain respects. A sociologist who had been at Toynbee Hall as well as at the universities of Paris and Berlin, he knew about strikes and lock-outs, arbitration, penal codes, and indeed all that a socially aware person of the Nineties could decently be aware of. He was a Unitarian, but in full Puritan ...”

“... his writing, and we are told that Emerson kept a print of Vesuvius in eruption in his front hall at Concord all his life. More than once, Richardson makes claims for Emerson as a sort of closet Dionysus, quoting from his journal: ‘O Bacchus, make them drunk, drive them mad, this multitude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, starving ...”

“... finding it ‘simple and unimposing’, as Kissinger noted, and with a ping-pong table in the hall. Then they encountered Mao himself: shuffling, speaking with difficulty, supported by one of his ‘pretty young assistants’. The meeting with Mao may have represented a momentous ‘earthquake in the Cold War landscape’ as MacMillan claims, but it was ...”

“... she would tell the Paris Review several decades later – the interviewer was the poet Donald Hall. Her teachers for the most part had more old-fashioned tastes; and the writers they admired tended not to be the same as those – Browning, Yeats, James – she would pick out. She had no time for Edwardian sentiment and shied away from the prevailing ...”

“... verse translation of Homer before 1598 would have made Homer, or anyone with an ear, groan. Arthur Hall, from Grantham in Lincolnshire, had trundled out ten books of the Iliad in flat, heavy fourteeners in 1581. Hall did not work from the Greek, or even from the Latin, but from Hugues Salel’s French translation, which was ...”

“... by the conspiracist Glenn Beck and a former ‘special guest’ on Duck Dynasty, fired up the hall when he suddenly stopped reading the teleprompter to ‘speak from the heart’: ‘To the next generation, your war is here, you don’t have to go searching for it. Your people are afraid … Who among you will love something more than you love ...”

“... is this ensemble, stretching across a millennium and round thousands of miles of coastline, that Richard Fletcher has taken as his subject in The Conversion of Europe. What concerns him is not the conversion of this or that people but all medieval conversions (including conversions between Christianity and its two rival monotheisms, Judaism and Islam, which ...”