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“... wrote the poem ‘Water’ about being on the coast of Maine in the summer of 1948 with Elizabeth Bishop; he put it first in his collection For the Union Dead, which he published in 1964. He sent Bishop a draft of the poem in March 1962, explaining that it was ‘more romantic and grey than the whole truth, for all has been ...”

“... as usual in incendiary mood, poured scorn on him and his associates. ‘You and Mr Conrad and Mr James and all those old fellows are done,’ he was to be heard insisting. ‘Exploded! ... Fichus! ... No good! ... Finished!’ Lewis’s beef was with literary ‘impressionism’: with novels which sought intricately to render the movements, at once furtive ...”

“... know more about Brossier than most. A letter survives from one of her neighbours imploring the bishop of Paris not to trust her. The unmarried daughter of a family fallen on hard times, her demoniac fits had started as an exercise in mimicry, after a spate of possessions and a witchcraft trial in a nearby town. She had studied pamphlets about Nicole ...”

“... Soane was born in 1753, the son of a Berkshire bricklayer. At 15 he met a London architect, James Peacock, who was closely associated with George Dance, architect to the City of London. Dance gave Soane a place in his household. After three or four years he left Dance for Henry Holland, from whom he learned more of the business side of building and on ...”

“... are dearest to him in the world.’ This is from the biography of one of my grandfathers, later Bishop of Lincoln: it tactfully conceals the fact that in the 1860s his father kept a shop, and got hopelessly into debt. Edward Benson was spared this, but when his mother died in 1850 he was still working for his tripos at Cambridge, and since she had been ...”

“... spent nearly ten times that much on restoration and redevelopment in the neighbouring town of Bishop Auckland. Over the past three years, while the building works were ongoing, the paintings have been on tour to New York, Dallas and Jerusalem. Earlier this year they returned to Auckland Castle, where they were put back on display along with a faithful ...”

“... the blackmail, seemed almost pagan to me. Augustine, the great early theologian, the North African bishop heavily influenced by Neoplatonism, is in many ways the patron saint of this pagan Christianity. Majestically, Augustine spent much of his life as a Christian applying his superbly lucid and restless mind to the hazard of human sinfulness, the release of ...”

“... already photographed shipwrecks when the German steamship Schiller sank off the skerry known as Bishop Rock in 1875. More than three hundred men died, not far from shore. He wrote many articles about the disaster. His son Alexander went further: when the Aksai, a Russian steamer, was wrecked on White Island later that year, he went out in a small boat, in a ...”

“... thing with poetry that it finds its own moment. The poets that have meant most to me – Lowell, Bishop, Schuyler – all, as it were, were rudely kept waiting by me. I had their books, or I already knew some poems of theirs, but there was no spark of transference. Then it happened, and our tepid prehistory was, quite literally, forgotten beyond a lingering ...”

“... with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom’. This was the primary reason King James II was forced out and replaced by reliably Protestant co-rulers, William and Mary. This Revolution brought in its train several other constitutional changes. Within two decades the succession had been diverted through the Act of Settlement (1701) to the ...”

“... a flourish. The ‘defining presences’ for many of these poets are, apparently, Auden, Ashbery, Bishop and Mahon. From these writers, we are told, the selected poets have learned to write ‘a poetry that understands that before it is moral, representational or empirical, it is above all sceptical.’ But first of all, the editors can’t mean both ...”

“... land of his captivity, to convert the Irish to Christianity and preside over the Irish Church as bishop in Armagh. Patrick is unusual among major-league patron saints in having bequeathed us two records of his authentic writing. One is a testy autobiographical tract known as the Confessio; it provides the narrative of his youth, capture, flight from and ...”

“... a slip of paper bearing in a neat italic hand the words ‘I expect you have remembered to ask the Bishop to say grace.’ It was passed to me some years ago during pre-dinner drinks at the judges’ lodgings in Lincoln by the butler, who had sensed that, though formally in charge, I was not to the manner born. I had the same sense of not quite belonging in ...”

“... Magdalen College was founded in 1458 by William Waynflete, a farmer’s son who became the bishop of Winchester and chancellor of England, and so endowed the college as to make it the richest in Oxford or Cambridge until the foundation of Cardinal College (renamed Christ Church after Wolsey’s fall). It did no harm to Magdalen that Wolsey, who was one of its fellows, himself became Henry VIII’s chancellor ...”

“... not forget the splendours of that heyday, in Bath: ‘The most fashionable library before 1800 was James Marshall’s in Milsom Street, where from 1793 to 1799 the mostly aristocratic and upper-class subscribers included two princes (the Prince of Wales and Frederick, Prince of Orange), five dukes, four duchesses, seven earls, 14 countesses, many other nobles ...”