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“... giving birth to evolution.’ ‘When a man desires ardently to know the truth,’ the pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce wrote at the close of the 19th century, ‘his first effort will be to imagine what that truth can be … It is not too much to say that next after the passion to learn there is no quality so indispensable to the successful prosecution of ...”

“... a provocatively Catholicising polemical gesture by the campaigning editors, emboldened by Charles I’s direct patronage of the project. Here, with a vengeance, was the High Church Andrewes, father of Laudianism and of later Anglo-Catholicism. Puritans, unwilling to relinquish possession of the most famous preacher of the age, but constrained by royal ...”

“... century. Both fled their home cities as children to escape racial violence: Gordon, the Robert Charles riots of 1900, in which a mob of white Southerners murdered dozens after an African American man shot a police officer who had asked what he was doing in a mainly white neighbourhood; Croll, the Odessa pogrom of 1905, in which more than four hundred Jews ...”

“... English have their houses made of sticks and dirt but they fare commonly so well as the king.’ This was possibly a traveller’s tale swelled by English patriotism, but in good times it contained some truth, and that it could be uttered and believed in its day is itself significant. Dr Palliser shows that one reason for low taxation was ...”

“... a Catholic martyr because he died opposing Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and the King’s robbery from the Pope of the leadership of the English Church. But he is also seen as a lawyer-layman caught in the mesh of presumptuous ecclesiology, an English Cicero of the pre-Reformation who nobly gave his head to forces beyond his control. Most ...”

“... the death of Louis? Couldn’t he have intervened to arrest the chain of events that had led the king inexorably to the guillotine? In the summer of 1792, with the Austrian and Prussian armies massing on the borders of France, threatening to invade in order to restore Louis to all the ‘legitimate authority’ he had exercised before the Revolution, the ...”

“... elaborately presented. In the great tournament ordered by Henry VIII in 1511, for example, the king and three companions, presenting themselves as ‘les quater Chivalers de la forrest salvigne’, emerged from an elaborate artificial wood, consisting of ‘12 hawthorns, 12 oaks, 12 maples, 10 birches, 16 dozen fern roots and branches, 60 broom stalks, and ...”

“... had unexpected former careers: one was an ex-pickpocket, and one a highwayman who had turned king’s evidence to save his neck. Others came from thoroughly peaceable trades: a hatter, a pastry-cook, a button-maker, a saddler and a shoemaker all signed up in the course of the next few decades. The court at Bow Street was on the ground floor of the ...”

“... Smith, sometimes he was Stewart, and sometimes he was Preston, but the most telling of the aliases Charles Stewart Parnell used to conduct the liaison with Mrs O’shea that eventually destroyed him was undoubtedly ‘Mr Fox’. Revealed by the divorce proceedings of November 1890, which, in wrecking his alliance with Gladstonian Liberalism, cost him his ...”

“... into Van Gogh, Corot into Pissarro, Constable into Monet – and Monet into Jackson Pollock. Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner in Romanticism and Realism, a book based on articles written in the course of recent years for the New York Review of Books, are anxious to defend the idea of a ‘modern tradition’ and argue that Romantics, Realists and ...”

“... Voltaire’s Zadig, and the authorities of Babylon in the mystery of the sacred horse of the king and the queen’s respectable dog. Clues, then, if they are to be fair, must fall within that area of common knowledge the validity of which a judge in court feels free to take into judicial notice: things so generally known to be true that evidence need not ...”

“... of the Magnet cast: for instance, we are asked to suppose that Frank Richards (his real name was Charles Hamilton, but Hughes affects not to know this), scouring Eton with a literary purpose in mind, came face to face with a boy called Anthony Eden and put him down on paper as Harry Wharton. (In fact, this isn’t too wide of the mark. ...”

“... to having thought well enough of it to give Banting a room and the services of a medical student, Charles Best, whose principal duty would be to carry out the crucially important job of estimating the concentration of reducing sugars in blood and urine – a simple procedure now that it has been streamlined and virtually automated by the pharmaceutical ...”

“... to see war at first hand, strolled into the trenches and found himself crouching alongside the king, who was furious to encounter him there. As Macaulay writes in his History of England,‘Mr Godfrey, you ought not to run these hazards, you are not a soldier; you can be of no use to us here.’ ‘Sir,’ answered Godfrey, ‘I run no more hazards than ...”

“... quite natural. There is no jolt, no place to pause and say this is no longer believable. Stephen King considers Jackson one of the great horror writers because she ‘never had to raise her voice’. There are no sudden twists in ‘The Lottery’. It appears to darken gradually, although in fact it does so at remarkable speed. Tessie’s reaction when her ...”