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“... is sui generis in the same way. It also seems to stand outside its author. Although Professor Martin does the best that can be done with him, FitzGerald was not, from the literary point of view, a particularly interesting man. He lacks the artistic quiddity of even such minor Victorian figures as Coventry Patmore or ...”

“... at postmortem as grey-pink blobs in the brain. The first neurologist to describe it was Jean-Martin Charcot of the Salpêtrière in Paris, who in 1868 called it ‘sclérose en plaques disseminées’. In German the disease became known as ‘Multiple Sklerose’ and in English ‘disseminated sclerosis’. By the 1950s the anglophone medical community ...”

“... Newman’s conversion to Rome five years earlier finally reached the nation as a whole. As Brian Martin reports, Punch brutally caricatured ‘a thin, emaciated, bespectacled Newman’ alongside ‘a fat, hypocritical Wiseman’ and rumours spread that Newman ‘was married and had locked his wife away in a convent’. Newman survived the assault, of ...”

“... and writer for children, has been singled out for praise by critics as diverse as Philip Toynbee, Francis King, Angus Wilson and Andrew Sinclair. All feel that he lacks the large audience he deserves. Yet the curious reader, anxious to gain more information about this somewhat enigmatic writer, of undoubted power (and above all vision), may easily find ...”

“... In December 1989, as Nicolae Ceausescu was led out from the courtroom in Tirgoviste to his summary execution, he began to hum the opening bars of the ‘Internationale’. More than four decades earlier, Primo Levi recalled that as the Red Army speechlessly liberated the fortunate few from Auschwitz, a fellow survivor, a German named Thylle, sat on his bunk and sang the ‘Internationale’ too: ‘in a low stridulous voice, grotesque and solemn at the same time ...”

“... much more so, I think, than Vietnam veterans about their dealings with the ‘gooks’. Martin Evans is absolutely right when he says that the subject of torture in Algeria has for many years been taboo in France. A lot of serious research is going on now, but the story has been slow to emerge. As we know, the huge silent majority of conscripts, or ...”

“... voluminous correspondence that Emily Tennyson had hoarded, making a total of about 40,000 letters. Francis Palgrave and Henry Sidgwick helped Hallam sort them, throwing away whatever seemed to them unimportant or, more seriously, too revealing about Tennyson’s background of family illness, insanity and drunkenness, or what might in other ways blemish the ...”

“... more than Venus and Mars. The reputation of An Allegory soon went downhill; by 1951 the curator Martin Davies wrote that it was by ‘some feeble imitator of Botticelli’. It is certainly, according to all the tests, an old picture: the support, ground, pigments and medium are appropriate for Italy around 1500. Science in this case can only say that the ...”

“... best thing to do is to plunge into the middle or just beyond and then work back and forth as Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker do in The Spanish Armada. The first page shows Sir John Hawkins writing a dispatch to Walsingham dated from on board the Victory in the North Sea on 10 August 1588. Somewhere to leeward, in spite of the fierce running battle of ...”

“... not be analysed in The Spanish Armada, published in 1988 by the underwater archaeologist Colin Martin and the historian Geoffrey Parker. Of the hundred or so books marking the quatercentenary of the fleet’s defeat, theirs stood out for its fusion of archaeology and documentary evidence: a triumph of rubber and tweed underpinned by collegiate spirit ...”

“... it’s OK for little boys to run round wearing Liverpool shirts or shouting ‘I’ll be Trevor Francis,’ this is strongly frowned upon for even slightly bigger boys. One remembers the games teacher in Kes who ran the whole football session so he could pretend he was Bobby Charlton. Everybody does this in their heads, just like Walter Mitty, but let it ...”

“... The period​ in Francis Bacon’s life between 1933 and 1944 remains a mystery. We know who he was seeing and where he was living. We know what he painted: in 1933, when he was 23, his Crucifixion that looks like an X-ray; eleven years later, the contortions of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion ...”

“... of civilisation, as Spengler had famously put it, over culture – has anything to say to us. Francis Dunlop and, one assumes, his publishers, Roger Scruton and Jessica Douglas-Home, have no doubts. Scheler, Dunlop suggests, was addressing ‘a political situation not unlike our own ... a breakdown of the old order, loss of the sense of community, triumph ...”

“... art with life by imagining him thinking, speaking and writing in perfect print-ready copy. Peter Martin’s introduction to the tercentenary edition of Selected Writings sets up an echo chamber of affirmations of Johnson’s eternal appeal ranging from Ruskin to Beckett to Seamus Heaney to that American avatar of Johnson, Harold Bloom, who places Johnson’s ...”

“... From the moment he died in April 1590, Francis Walsingham, principal secretary to Elizabeth I, has been the subject of competing myths. Catholics greeted the demise of a relentless opponent with relief and applause, and circulated lurid providential stories about the appalling stench that came from his corpse, which allegedly poisoned one of his pall-bearers ...”