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“... deplored the medieval fanaticism and popery. In The Mameluke or Slave Dynasty of Egypt (1896), William Muir, while suggesting that the Crusades had a positive role in rousing Europe from the slumber of the Dark Ages, went on to denounce them: The Crusades aggravated the intolerance of the day and promoted deeds of bloodshed and cruelty in the ...”

“... Replying in 1934 to a Japanese poet who had asked for advice about writing ‘modern’ poetry, William Empson recommended ‘verse with a variety of sorts of feeling in it . . . it might be a good thing to try to show the clash of different philosophies, and social comedy, and quote lines of poetry by people quite different from you that you have thought especially good ...”

“... The king, as part of Parliament, possessed and exercised specific powers’, to veto Bills, which William did more than once; to dissolve or prorogue Parliament; and to modify the composition of the upper house by appointments to bishoprics and the creation of peers. Monarchy after 1689, therefore, remained an essential element in the structure and ...”

“... writers when the subject finds himself among the sons of the East Coast establishment, from William Burroughs of St Louis to Norman Mailer, the Brooklyn Jew. The Lampoon officers recognised the worker in the ‘cultural bumpkin’: he could put out the magazine single-handed while everyone else was horsing around and drinking, a vice Updike hardly ever ...”

“... William Klassen, research professor at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem, is a New Testament scholar with a theory about Judas Iscariot. He would be the last to say he is first in the field with a theory about Judas, but he can plausibly claim to be unique in having appeared before classes and congregations dressed as he supposes Judas to have been at the moment of the Crucifixion, and keen to defend his actions against what he knew would be the enraged accusations of his auditors ...”

“... stories, was a sister-in-law of Burne-Jones and aunt of Rudyard Kipling. From Burne-Jones and William Morris, a family friend, her husband commissioned work; from Kipling her son derived a touch of literary inspiration and even an occasional helping hand with his style. Cambridge added to the mix the sense of Britain’s manifest destiny entertained by ...”

“... again, however, Erasmus is fated to end up as history’s nearly man. Early in the Reformation, William Tyndale identified him as a permanent dweller in the halfway house, and now even Screech, for all his sympathy for Erasmus’s pioneering humanity, finds him ultimately lacking. In the Praise of Folly and, more unexpectedly, in his annotations to the New ...”

“... together the details of Mendonça’s campaign, Nafafé shows that abolitionism began not with William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, but with a transnational African movement a century earlier. In order to make this case, he has to reconstruct the complex and intertwined worlds of Angola, Brazil and Southern Europe in the 17th century. The Portuguese ...”

“... To write well about William Blake you need to be enthusiastic, aphoristic and contrary. It also helps to be slightly mad. You need to begin your book with a paragraph like this: When Blake spoke the first word of the 19th century there was no one to hear it, and now that his message, the message of emancipation from reality through the ‘shaping spirit of imagination’, has penetrated the world, and is slowly remaking it, few are conscious of the first utterer, in modern times, of the message with which all are familiar ...”

“... crowd: this isn’t the result of a grassroots movement. As has been documented by the historian William Cronen, reporters for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, much of the GOP programme, as handed down to state legislators, was conceived if not written by an organisation called the American ...”

“... gauged by the successive and overlapping careers of three 16th-century Scottish clergymen called William Chisholm. All three in turn exercised episcopal jurisdiction in the diocese of Dunblane; no need to ask if they were by any chance related. They were Scottish noblemen, and that’s what medieval Scottish noblemen did: pass on large quantities of church ...”

“... roots’ to, inter alia, ‘Love and Loss, Redemption and the Myth of the Wild West’, Dylan’s Christian conversion, and his appearance as ‘Jewish Amerindian and White Negro’. It is all a bit too much, but at least Mellers takes care, unlike Jonathan Cott in his expensive, over-reverential tome: one more coffee-table book. It may seem a bit Dylanesque ...”

“... spreads through every member.’ Here surely begins the revulsion against the asceticism of the Christian tradition, which had begun with St Jerome and his praise of alousia, the state of being unwashed: ‘He who has once bathed in Christ has no need of another bath.’ The practical result was that baths, variously described as Turkish, Roman and ...”

“... the Utilitarians, when we think of the period as an era of freedom. There is the great anarchist William Godwin, whose treasured insight it was that our impulses are the artefacts of society and who didn’t hesitate to carry that insight into the sexual domain. His feminist partner Mary Wollstonecraft applied the same thought to women’s sexual ...”

“... he looked on Gibbon as ‘still our master, above and beyond “date”’, unlike David Hume and William Robertson, who had become classics and were no longer read. Because Gibbon was still a contemporary and an authority, he was not ‘out of date’, and should be consulted and corrected by the historian of late Antiquity, who read him to see where he was ...”