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“... The final day of monastic life at Evesham witnessed the standard process of surrender by which Henry VIII’s government took possession of these ancient and supposedly perpetual corporations; but someone decided to add extra pointed drama to the occasion – probably the abbot himself, Philip Ballard alias Hawford (medieval Benedictines tended to acquire ...”

“... no attempt at an intimate portrayal of historical figures. After Washington DC, Vidal wrote Burr, Lincoln and 1876, which are much more genuinely historical novels. Empire and Hollywood are in the same mode except that they reintroduce the characters of Washington DC in youth and early middle age. Not surprisingly, some adroit new invention is needed, and ...”

“... conversion to Communism while serving in World War Two; his impersonation of the gangly Abraham Lincoln at union events and his subsequent employment on popular radio shows in New York City; his marriage to the fading Hollywood actress Eve Fine, and the dreadful combustion of that marriage in a series of mutual betrayals that lead to the exposure of Ira’s ...”

“... by the author, who sees through their eyes and expresses himself in their manner. As the Rector of Lincoln College, and its historian, this comes naturally to Dr Green, and he probably understands better than anyone the peculiar Victorian Rector, Mark Pattison, who lived in the lodgings a hundred years before him. Now a rare and perhaps even a threatened ...”

“... It is almost as if Prager was trying not to sound heartless. Anyone who has read her story ‘The Lincoln-Pruitt Anti-Rape Device’ will know what a very cool eye she can cast on life and death. But when people try to sound caring they usually sound soulful, and so too often in Eve’s Tattoo does she. This is a pity – we have several reminders of how ...”

“... of historians elsewhere. So it was that a recent monograph on the Reformation in the diocese of Lincoln was hailed as a means of short-circuiting this endeavour. For was not that vast area equivalent to Middle England, as it were the Kansas and the conscience of the nation, where, if anywhere, the lowest common denominator of changing religious sentiment ...”

“... go for ever undetected if corpses were cremated. Parsons quotes a sermon given by the Bishop of Lincoln in Westminster Abbey on 5 July 1874: Brethren, more than fourteen hundred years have now passed away, since the flames of funeral piles, which once blazed in all parts of the Roman Empire, have been extinguished by Christianity. And now it is proposed by ...”

“... would marry their exploratory sensibilities. All these artists were struggling, in the words of Lincoln Kirstein, who co-founded the New York City Ballet, ‘to impose a native meaning on a recalcitrant alien dance tradition’. Agnes de Mille too broke through in the 1940s, with a ballet called Rodeo in 1942, its score commissioned from Copland. The ...”

“... psychoanalysis with the American Leon Pierce Clark, the ‘psychobiographer’ of Napoleon and Lincoln, before seeking out Freud. Dempsey points out that Thayer and his companions in England – Eliot, Vivien and his cousin Lucy, who had introduced him to Vivien – all had serious mental breakdowns, and all but Eliot would end their lives under ...”

“... Louis Daguerre announced his ability to ‘seize the light’, a claim soon rephrased by William Henry Fox Talbot as the art of ‘fixing a shadow’. As for 1865, it’s the year that marks, along with much else, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the end of the American Civil War, and the inauguration of ...”

“... repertoire, because it can be made to speak to the adventures of Charles II. In much the same way, Henry V offers itself as a vehicle for the mediation of wartime trauma. In our own century, Olivier’s film addresses the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944 and – perhaps more obliquely – Kenneth Branagh’s film engages with the current carnage of ...”

“... The Path of the King, tracing ancestral virtues and vices from a Viking prince to Abraham Lincoln, taking in the depravities of Titus Oates. Even before reading these quite gripping books, we were vaguely acquainted, through schools, comics and movies, with the periods and principalities commemorated, and we were pleased to see them so imaginatively ...”

“... feeble: in 1509 they were conspicuous for not being among the 48 companies which took part in Henry VII’s funeral procession. By the 1530s, though, things were perking up, at least if we take the seating plan for a lord mayor’s feast as a marker of prominence in the City: four stationers shared a table with a mix of ...”

“... biography of Gore Vidal. Kaplan, a professor of English in New York whose taxidermies include Henry James, Dickens and Carlyle (they hardly get deader than Carlyle), understands that it’s much easier to get the paperwork done if you don’t have the living-breathing item second-guessing you at every turn or trying to use you as a ventriloquist’s ...”

“... the same story in different settings. On hearing the word ‘commitment’, she sought refuge in Henry James (an odd hero for a writer whose sentences are so unencumbered and who was also besotted by Elmore Leonard), but she was happy to be accused of consistency: she believed in the salutary power of memory, and the value of precedent. Consistency, after ...”