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“... to embrace the sober-minded, philistine meliorism of a Macaulay, whose famous jibe in his essay on Francis Bacon that ‘an acre in Middlesex is worth a principality in Utopia’ is the credo, in Jacoby’s view, of our cynically apathetic, myopically pragmatic age. Although he readily concedes that he has no blueprint for action himself, he nonetheless ...”

“... Enjoy your apotheosis. The constellation of white explorers said to have been hailed as gods – Francis Drake, Hernán Cortés, Captain Cook, Christopher Columbus, to name a few – acquired a new star in the mid-1970s, when Prince Philip vacationed off the coast of Tanna, in what was then the New Hebrides, aboard HMY Britannia. Ever since, a string of ...”

“... cartooned by Gillray, Cruickshank, Rowlandson and Dent; and portrayed by Romney, Beechey, Hoppner, Matthew Peters and John Russell. Nor has she been entirely forgotten by posterity. To be sure, she was not even mentioned by name in Percy Fitzgerald’s two-volume life of King William IV, published in 1884. But she merited an entry in the Dictionary of National ...”

“... St Paul as the humiliated son of a failed businessman (and as the inordinately proud descendant of Francis Scott Key, author of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’); the glorious salad days at Princeton University, which he left without a degree; the wartime courtship of Zelda Sayre, the belle of Montgomery, Alabama; the sudden fame – and the marriage to Zelda ...”

“... jurisdiction. The reign’s biggest disaster – one which, according to the St Albans chronicler Matthew Paris, caused a crisis in belief throughout Christendom – was Louis’s capture by the Egyptian sultan in 1250; and there may have been a Spanish element to that too, since Louis’s underestimation of Muslim power may have been encouraged by the recent ...”

“... are the precise references to the text of the New Testament. Screech discusses 16 passages from Matthew and 34 from Paul, noting the allusions to contemporary disputes over the interpretation of Hebrews xi, 1 on the nature of faith, and Romans xiv, 5 on the nature of Christian freedom. Less obvious still are the references to Hebrew legend and to what ...”

“... from the pope, successor of Peter, chosen by Christ to be the rock on which he built his church (Matthew 16.18), rather than that every bishop directly represented Christ’s authority. Prince-bishops in the Holy Roman Empire were not the only prominent members of the episcopate to feel unenthusiastic about an affirmation of the pope’s exclusive ...”

“... amateurish lyrics, or ‘songs’, and Gothic fragments, as well as one wholesale plagiarism from Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis. The presence of the plagiarised poem, probably added to fill out the volume, makes Shelley’s yearning to establish himself as an author clear. A similar desperation is evident in the various adolescent displays of ‘genius’ that he ...”

“... Irish independence and British devolution.At the heart of Bucknell’s book is an examination of Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861), which Ezra Pound denounced three-quarters of a century later as a ‘stinking sugar teat’, but which sold very well from the outset and, as Bucknell ...”

“... by a woman who prostrates herself to weep over his feet, but in the versions of the story in Matthew 26 and Mark 14 she pours the costly ointment on his head. The disciples object, saying it would have been better to give the money to the poor, and are reprimanded by Jesus. This woman has long been identified as Mary of Bethany (Pasolini brilliantly cast ...”

“... John Coplans; the sculptors Jeff Koons, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn; the painters Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville; the performance and video artists Joseph Beuys, Rebecca Horn, Bruce Nauman, Arnulf Rainer and Matthew Barney. Their work commonly involves the display of the artists themselves in ...”

“... an Irishman bearing the exquisitely un-Protestant name of Murphy, which enliven the pages of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy: but both belong to the same record of continual religious controversy in 19th-century England. (It was intramural contention, however, not the larger one between Protestant and Catholic, which ignited one of the most ...”

“... them himself ... It so happens that this thumbnail portrait fits Andrew’s younger brother, John Matthew, who was educated 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 ...”

“... of society’. Reviewing Southey’s oriental romance, Thalaba the Destroyer, late in 1802, Francis Jeffrey in the first number of the Edinburgh Review brings up the Cottle connection for the first time. Recalling Southey’s earlier political notoriety and Wordsworth’s Preface, he turns the latter by selective quotation into the democratic manifesto ...”

“... for the souls of the penitent on earth as well as for the wept-for departed.’ Thomas Becket and Francis of Assisi were both noted for their tears. St Francis was reputed to have gone blind with his weeping for the sufferings of Christ. On his deathbed, he remembered to thank his donkey for carrying him through his arduous ...”