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“... that the screenplay is by Pasolini, and so it is. But not in the same way that the screenplay for John Huston’s The Bible is by Christopher Fry, or for Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ by Paul Schrader. Pasolini hasn’t really written this movie, he has made excerpts from the gospel and filmed them, either as images in the manner we have ...”

“... fashion, with a few feminist trimmings, is in the same tradition as Ruskin’s ‘The King of the Golden River’ (1850) where his fiercely-held political, aesthetic and ecological doctrines reappear in fantastic guise. In ‘A Toy Princess’ (1877) Mary de Morgan mounts a conventional attack on the conventional Victorian miss; and Frances Browne ...”

“... furnace and the smoky atmospherics which he calls ‘Gothic’. But the poem is dedicated to John Cowper Powys, whose Atlantis, one of his most eccentric novels, is cited as a source. As Fisher himself points out, A Furnace inherits Powys’s ‘Romantic notion’ that ‘the making of all kinds of identities is a primary impulse which the cosmos itself ...”

“... very well since. Kenneth Anger has been this kind of wallflower at the orgy for years. The dragon king of gorgeous Hollywood has him in thrall. His snappy chapter-headings (‘Closely Observed Blondes’, ‘Babylon Boozers’, ‘Hollywood Drugstore’) give a promise that is always kept. A sample from another chapter (‘The Magic of Self-Murder’) conveys ...”

“... Surrey is the Country of my Birth and my delight,’ John Evelyn told John Aubrey; and like Surrey, Evelyn has had more than his fair share of bad press over the years. Yet to picture him as simply the pious sermoniser the Victorians eulogised is as misleading as to write off Surrey as wall-to-wall Weybridge ...”

“... of musicians and courtiers at Hampton Court. Negotiations broke down, and in November the king fled. By then Hesperides – which might partly have been designed as a bid for favour within that renewed royal household – was in press. It remained as a monument to the rapid fluctuations of its times. Herrick was the son of a wealthy London ...”

“... and which prefigures the cross, the Last Supper, the lamb of God, the pointing finger of John the Baptist, the resurrected Christ trampling the dragon or skeleton of sin and death. Many of them also depict the new church, in representations of Protestant celebration of the gospel sacraments of baptism and communion, and in portraits of its leaders or ...”

“... anticlerical French model, was misguided rather than vicious. This distinction was confirmed by John Robison, professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh, in Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe (1797). British Masonry stood in a different relationship to the visible Establishment. Whereas in 1738 Pope Clement XII’s ...”

“... and a date: 1633. This was the year a local gentleman, Sir John Reresby of Thrybergh Hall, began to note the contents of his garden. Every peach, pear and plum is catalogued, as are herbs, shrubs, bulbs – ‘Kentish Codlings’, ‘the Granado Gilliflower’, ‘Melincholly Munkes hoode’ – and attempts at grafting ...”

“... Similarly Shakespeare, a socially ambitious young man, could have been loudly anti-Catholic, as in King John, without abandoning the family beliefs. He was ‘an exemplary Elizabethan venturer’ – not, as Thomson agrees, that this fact is of paramount importance, but it is well to know he wasn’t immune from ‘the infections of his ...”

“... lack biographies in depth of key religious figure such as Stephen Marshall, Cornelius Burges, John Goodwin, Edmund Calamy, Henry Burton and others. They flit tantalisingly through the pages of Valerie Pearl’s valuable study of the London revolution of 1641, or Anthony Fletcher’s equally important analysis of petitioning on the eve of Civil War. It is ...”

“... her definite superior in intelligence: the only one of Henry’s six wives whose marriage to the king was regularly called her ‘reign’ by contemporaries. That she had a mind of her own and was not afraid to use it is the most plausible explanation of her eventual downfall in 1536. Eric Ives’s biography of Anne, published in 2004, revealed her as a ...”

“... neatly divided by four traditional ‘quarter days’ – Annunciation (25 March), the Nativity of John the Baptist (24 June), Michaelmas (29 September) and Christmas – that were used as deadlines for instalments of rent and debt.The annual religious cycle melded with older traditions of seasonal celebration, and spurred new ones too. In England the calendar ...”

“... stronger than his occasional grudging acceptance of a community of interest. With Anne came the King’s doctor William Butts, ‘whose unobtrusive services to the evangelical cause played a key part in the course of Henrician reformation’. This Boleyn-Butts axis often appears in this book competing vigorously for limelight with Thomas Cromwell. We should ...”

“... is vividly symbolised in Egypt by the physical link between the library and the (dead) body of the king. So, for example, long before the foundation of the Hellenistic library of Alexandria the tomb of the pharaoh Rameses II had contained a renowned ‘sacred library’; and just next to the Alexandrian Museum itself was the Soma (literally ‘the ...”