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“... begins in Paris, ‘the biggest city west of Cairo’ and ‘five times the size of London’. Stephen Nichols starts his chapter by discussing a young girl, Christine de Pizan, soon to be the first internationally known female French author. He takes us through the reasons for Paris’s pre-eminence – partly political, partly literary, partly ...”

“... Degas position the animals in Racehorses at Longchamps. He had reproductions of Dürer’s etching Knight, Death and the Devil and a copy of a frieze from the Parthenon back in the studio of his House of Pleasure. They are present in Riders on the Beach as well. Two hooded riders – death on horseback – lead the other horsemen to an endless horizon. There ...”

“... Foxe said he had never read anything ‘less pleasant, more choppy or more rebarbative’ than Stephen Gardiner’s prose (‘he spirals off so wildly that he needs a Sibyl rather than a translator’); Balthasar Moretus of the Plantin company complained that one author’s ‘writing, which is not so much inelegant as simply full of mistakes, terrifies ...”

“... and early 19th centuries is now both ubiquitous and invisible, so in a sense it always was. As Stephen Deuchar shows in his impressive account of 18th-century sporting art, we know very little about almost all the artists who produced it. The names of some are known to us only through their pictures; of others, we know their names but nothing by them; of ...”

“... Lost, but at least this was an ocean well-stocked with monsters:No wonder, if these did the knight appall;For all that here on earth we dreadful hold,Be but as bugs to fearen babes withall,Compared to the creatures in the seas entrall.After Spenser a little Hakluyt, the obligatory Psalm 107, some Chapman, Donne, Dryden and so to Addison, whose ...”

“... five, they were still crossing, and I beeped on six.The traffic signal was invented by John Peake Knight, a superintendent of the South-Eastern Railway, and the first was installed outside the Houses of Parliament in 1868. They have always been objects of dispute, and even of irony: the first one exploded one morning, due to a leaky gas valve, badly injuring ...”

“... pretty quickly on the reader of Borges’s collected sonnets, and even creeps up in the course of Stephen Kessler’s introduction to the volume. Here we learn first that Borges the poet is ‘quite a different writer from the one we thought we knew’; then that he is ‘earnest’ in his poems and ‘less ironic’ than in his fiction; that he is ‘a ...”

“... recruited from men ranked as gentry, whose resources were comparable with those of a later knight or esquire. The government hired professionals, too, whether for the royal bodyguard of ‘housecarls’, or for the navy: the English fleet patrolled the south coast through the summer of 1066, disbanding only when it seemed that the Normans were not ...”

“... of Robert Cecil’s ‘painefull daies, your many watchfull nights’. He wasn’t exaggerating. Stephen Alford’s All His Spies is an account of a man at the heart of power, but it isn’t exactly a biography, or a work of political history; it might be better described as a voyage through a landscape of political crisis, seen through the eyes of his ...”

“... of whom pass through his pages leaving hardly a trace. David Frost, Charles Douglas-Home, Andrew Knight (the editor of the Economist), Frank Giles, Richard Kershaw, Stephen Spender and others eat and drink their way, sometimes to Tehran, but never, it would seem, to saying anything very interesting or useful. A string of ...”

“... revealed many details of the fascinating relationship between Palmerston and the press, and that Stephen Koss in the first volume of The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain (1981) dealt with it critically and at length. Yet a reader turning to Miss Brown’s book and expecting it to live up to its title might well be disappointed if he had not ...”

“... he resigned the chancellorship. As one of his contemporaries remarked: ‘From a secular man and a knight, [Henry II] had fashioned an archbishop.’ Becket had jumped the tracks.The handful of documents on display at the British Museum are included for the iconography of their seals, but they also serve as material witnesses to royal and ecclesiastical ...”

“... and marketed male style from Playboy to Carnaby Street. Alistair O’Neill’s article on John Stephen, ‘The King of Carnaby Street’, for example, shows how Stephen successfully adapted a gay style to the mass heterosexual menswear market in the 1960s. Indeed, men’s clothing choices in general seem to produce a ...”

“... is keen to have another child. If he could get Molly away from Boylan and ‘get her to bed with Stephen’ he thinks he could manage it provided Stephen preceded him – perhaps when Stephen returned to Eccles Street, as he promised. Joyce was apparently ‘shy’ about this bit of ...”

“... Caroline, who in the 1730s had begun the fashion for giving patronage to ‘unlettered poets’. Stephen Duck, Queen Caroline’s thresher poet, eventually threw himself into the river; Ann Yearsley was made of tougher stuff. More, of course, considered her a savage when the affair turned nasty, though Yearsley got there first: ‘For mine’s a stubborn and ...”