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“... monarchism is in tension with some proto-republican elements. Paulin’s next major monarchist, John Dryden, seems a less ambiguous figure: ‘Absalom and Achitophel’, which Paulin much admires and prints in full, presents the political debate stirred up by the Whigs as a feverish disease of which the body politic needs to be cured. This nostalgia for an ...”

“... the mad at Bicêtre asylum in 1793 (a much celebrated event that never actually took place), or John Conolly abolishing the use of restraints on his arrival at Hanwell asylum in London in 1839. As John Foot stresses throughout his exemplary account, myth and reality aren’t easily separated in Basaglia’s story. The ...”

“... that Bush’s delivery is really an impersonation of Ronald Reagan impersonating James Stewart and John Wayne, but I think that elevates him too much: his mentality is clouded with lesser subtleties, occluded with hungers of a more brutal, mercenary, low-budget kind. He has the effective salesman’s knowledge of how to play with people’s sense of what is ...”

“... from the necessity of taking the sacrament and pronouncing the words ‘on the true faith of a Christian’ when swearing the Oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance. The Jews in England reckoned that this privilege might come to them from the Whig government as some sort of reward for their loyal support of the Crown during the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, and ...”

“... compromise’ of the mid-Seventies, when the Italian Communist Party allied itself with the ruling Christian Democratic Party. In both cases, these broad alliances placed greater emphasis on staying in power than on clarity of policy and often led Parliament to ignore signs of corruption which would have torn the parties apart. In Sicily in the 1870s, Mafia ...”

“... made of it than either the waters or their meeting deserve.’ This is the English travel writer John Barrow writing of the Vale of Avoca in 1835. Like him, I find it hard to decide on the register of the phrase, so lyrical as a song title, so grandiloquent as a synonym for ‘confluence’; unlike Barrow, I find these meetings fascinating, but I don’t ...”

“... John Murray’s fiction has always seemed to arise directly from the circumstances of his own life. At first, his work concentrated on his childhood and adolescence among the tiny, depressed communities that straggle along the English side of the Solway Firth. He then broke with his working-class background and read Sanskrit and Avestan at Oxford, later studying classical Indian medicine ...”

“... the Scottish science of man is embedded deep in institutions. Hume, Smith, Adam Ferguson and John Millar have become tutelar deities of campus and think-tank, the respected grandfathers of the social sciences and patron saints of the policy wonk. Yet, for all this familiarity, the otherness of the Scottish Enlightenment tends to elude us. Adam Ferguson ...”

“... biography, published a decade ago, Thomas Corns and Gordon Campbell argued that the young John Milton was not, as he has often been portrayed, a born radical. Instead, they argued, before 1637 the young Milton was politically and religiously conservative, a member of the Church of England who supported the High Church reforms carried out by William ...”

“... Curiously, the first historian to query this complacent picture was the future arch-Eurosceptic, John Redwood, in his Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England 1660-1750 (1976). This told the story of the assault on orthodox Christianity launched during the Augustan age by a variegated cast of libertine rakes, deists and heterodox ...”

“... The painter​ Gwen John suffered from jealousy in her relationship with the sculptor Auguste Rodin. She was 27 when she started to model for him. He was 63. Rodin slept with a lot of women during his lifetime and the women he slept with also posed for him. John was jealous of Rodin’s other women ...”

“... her head to her waist, and from the waist down she is burning fire’.Lilith appears in European Christian literature of the 19th century, beginning with a scene in Goethe’s Faust (1808) in which Mephistopheles encourages Faust to dance with her. The episode intrigued artists. Richard Westall exhibited Faust and Lilith at the Royal Academy exhibition in ...”

“... like Cary Grant, attuned to someone else’s craziness. This is why it is so satisfying that Christian Bale, as Michael J. Burry, is central to the story. He has a glass eye because a childhood illness deprived him of his natural one, and likes to sit in his office and play the drums, write emails, and sift data as if he were a housebound Sherlock Holmes ...”

“... the mesmerising, litany-like repetitions. The murals were described by Théophile Gautier as a Christian Panathenaea; they could also be compared to medieval plainchant.Flandrin’s friezes must influence in subtle ways those for whom they are only background music. For those of us who choose to concentrate on them, the names of more than half of the ...”

“... rose all around, and the squalor was softened by the presence of a surprising number of churches, Christian and Orthodox, most of them built before the First World War, in the days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I had expected to be received rapidly and enthusiastically by Cozma. I was the only foreign reporter in town; I was writing for the Financial ...”