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“... idleness, and any book that claimed otherwise would be considered a letdown. The new biography by Catherine Mayer, Charles: The Heart of a King (W.H. Allen, £20), begins by reminding people of an earlier claim, made by Jeremy Paxman, that Charles regularly instructs his cook to boil seven eggs each morning in the hope of getting a soft one. But then quickly ...”

“... zip-jacketed, jeaned, it ran past him to the road.’ This is Benjie, delinquent boyfriend of Catherine, Frank’s second eldest daughter. Catherine is ‘pale-cheeked, slim-necked, broad-browed, sharp-nosed’ – ‘pugnaciously-featured’, in fact, like Attercliffe himself. Attercliffe and ...”

“... in Pinturicchio’s paintings there is no reference to any library, ancient or modern. In the ‘hall of saints’, one of the lunettes depicts Catherine of Alexandria confounding the pagan sages sent to convert her. But no attempt is made to locate this event in Egypt and indeed, a version of the Arch of Constantine ...”

“... In​ 1989, Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques published an anthology of articles from Marxism Today, the magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which Jacques edited. ‘The world has changed,’ they wrote in the introduction to New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s. ‘Britain and other advanced capitalist societies’ were ‘increasingly characterised by diversity, differentiation and fragmentation, rather than homogeneity, standardisation and the economies and organisations of scale which characterised modern mass society ...”

“... spring immediately to mind: Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, Bleak House, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss. Clearly this figure is not ‘an 18th-century phenomenon’, but what does that prove? It shows only that Victorian plots drew on the same resources as 18th-century plots. ‘Ah Gracious powers!’ Thackeray’s narrator ...”

“... enough to be worth passing down to your heirs. Wealthy citizens became discerning collectors. The hall of Robert Stodley, a merchant who died in 1536, contained cupboards, tables, a desk, a bench, a counting table and a chair ‘of English oak [with] a woman’s face on the back’. The lower orders collected possessions too. John Elmesley can’t have earned ...”

“... an increasing demarcation of male and female domestic roles – as traced by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall – swung back in the opposite direction after the mid-century. But if domestic practice was unchanged, what are we to make of the bold talk about the ‘incarnate anachronism’ of the kitchen-bound wife, and of the feast of miscellaneous ...”

“... David Landes complained of his pessimism about industrialisation, Edward Said of his Eurocentrism, Catherine Hall of his neglect of women and gender, Tony Judt, after The Age of Extremes appeared in 1994, of his disdain for the protean force of nationalism and his gingerly treatment of the Soviet Union’s crimes. Controversy just helped sales, and ...”

“... Charles explained; I ‘newar sawe woman soo wyepe’. On their return they had to face Henry. ‘Hall me trost es in you,’ the duke wrote to Wolsey. It had to be, since untangling his rich bride’s finances was ‘past me lerneng’. It’s impossible to say how much of Henry’s anger was for show. He was determined the crown should be the financial ...”

“... at Stonyhurst, better than it does Andrew himself, who was brought up by a private tutor at Marbot Hall. But what it describes is one half of the English experience Hildesheimer presents, the foil against which the other half – Andrew’s life – must be seen. More recent German Anglophiles have found that there is a price to pay for these attractive ...”

“... still stands. The early modern period saw the remodelling of many rural houses. The high central hall, with an open hearth and a hole in the roof, was modified by the introduction of a side fireplace with a chimney and a ceiling which created a new room or rooms above, reached by an internal staircase. Thatched roofs were replaced by tiles. Windows were ...”

“... vast nave – 13,500 square metres, more than four times the size of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall – is a formidable challenge. At the Tate, we’ve seen some artists respond by filling the space up (Anish Kapoor, Rachel Whiteread) and others by emptying it out (Bruce Nauman, Doris Salcedo). Some artists deal with the vastness by concerning themselves ...”

“... of years later, in 1543, Shardlake enters the political forcefield of another real-life figure, Catherine Parr, soon to be the final Mrs Tudor, and the secret object of Shardlake’s affections. This is Revelation (2008), which Sansom buffs refer to, Friends-style, as ‘the one about the serial killer’, just as they call Heartstone (2010) ‘the one ...”

“... of advice. Many a poor fellow was thus extricated from the Devil’s clutches’ and taken to the hall ‘surrounded and saturated by such mighty influence as would drive the Devil out and “Let the Master in”’. The exhorters, a tougher breed perhaps than mere Biblewomen, worked for the Salvation Army’s drunkards rescue branch. Their day job might be ...”

“... appeared in the New York Daily Tribune, making reference to the ‘mental disorder’ under which Catherine Dickens sometimes laboured. Not surprisingly, the legacies of 1858 included Wilkie Collins’s novel The Woman in White, about a woman whose husband plots to put her in an asylum. It was first published in Dickens’s Household Words the following ...”