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“... One hundred​ years ago, a soldier named Hector Hugh Munro was shot in the head as he crossed no-man’s-land. The night had been dark. Some of the soldiers accompanying him had lit up when they stopped to rest, and the glowing cigarettes attracted a German sniper’s attention. His last words were reported to be: ‘Put that bloody cigarette out!’ The soldier was perhaps the wittiest writer Britain had; his other name was Saki ...”

“... I first encountered King Solomon’s Mines in the children’s section of a public library in Harare. Most of the books smelled of water damage and many had been taken out so rarely that the last ‘return by’ stamp pre-dated Mugabe and decimalisation. I was working through shelves of books about horses and morality tales written by women who manifestly did not like children, and took King Solomon’s Mines because it’s set in ‘the Manica country’, a province a few hundred miles east of Harare ...”

“... the same man, in Wyatt’s case, who translated Plutarch’s The Quyete of Mynde for the solace of Katherine of Aragon. So violent, and so learned. The question remains haunting; Brigden, whose book will be the standard biography for years to come, calls it ‘one of the most unfathomable moments of his life’. Inevitably, though, the question that most dogs ...”

“... conspiracy to replace Elizabeth I with her papist cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, Donne was, as Katherine Rundell puts it in her new biography, ‘not just Catholic … but super-Catholic’, the scion of a double line of renowned religious recusants. His father’s family estates were confiscated by the crown, leaving the elder John Donne to pursue a ...”