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“... not above exchanging open abuse. During one argument about justification by faith, the Bishop of La Cava wrenched at the beard of the Cretan Bishop of Chironissa and Melopotamos, who had said that he was either a knave or a fool for sounding a bit like Martin Luther on justification. It is amazing that anything got done at all, and indeed more than once the ...”

“... for drunkenness. In his teens he more or less disappeared, though rumour had it that he joined the French army, travelled in Italy and then worked in the Low Countries as a merchant. It was not until the 1520s, when a successful legal practice led him into the service of Cardinal Wolsey as an agent or legal fixer, that he began to make his mark on the ...”

“... other areas with old religious or monastic connections (the Whitefriars, the Minories, St Martin le Grand, St Katherine by the Tower), was one of London’s quasi-autonomous ‘liberties’, and so not governed by the lord mayor. The second was that there had already been a theatre in the area, immediately adjacent to the ...”

“... by his side. He died on a cold day in January, and they prayed for him in chapel. We are not in a French-Canadian Catholic school, because of the portrait of the founder in the entrance hall, ‘the school’s chief financial rock, a fruit importer who had abandoned Presbyterianism for the Church of England when a sudden rise in wealth and status demanded the ...”

“... at keeping celibate. His wife remained in the background of Zwingli’s public ministry, unlike Katherine von Bora, the spirited ex-nun who married Luther three years later, but Anna still deserves respect for her pioneering role in overturning the clergy’s special status and privilege, upheld by the medieval Western rule on clerical celibacy. By the ...”

“... more heat than light. Dorinda Outram put the problem in simple, clear terms in The Body and the French Revolution. Feminist scholarship, she says, has ‘very often been tempted to see the actions of militant women during the Revolution, and their political clubs in particular, as forerunners of modern feminist movements, rather than examining them in the ...”

“... republicanism’s loss of innocence in the face of the Terror. With the collapse of hopes in the French republic, English liberals like Browning and Clough – one might add Landor, who deserved inclusion here – looked increasingly to the Italian cause. One of Paulin’s main aims is ‘to redeem Clough from the neglect which his work has suffered’, and ...”

“... which he made his way. Futility was turned down by 13 publishers before he sent it to the dying Katherine Mansfield, who got it published at once; it was a success, but not the wild one he seemed to expect. His choice of reader was shrewd: for all that he has to say about the English Romantics and Goethe and Proust, his true Penelope was Chekhov, a humorous ...”

“... too, for the custom of ‘manuscript bartering’ prevalent in the family, on the basis of ‘I’ll read yours if you’ll read and criticise mine.’ All of which is a foretaste of the warm family feeling which pervades this chronicle of politics and parturition (babies are born to the author on pages ...”

“... the architect of the match, Thomas Cromwell, who is beheaded on the very day his king marries Katherine Howard, niece of Cromwell’s arch-enemy the reactionary Duke of Norfolk (who in Mantel’s version resembles an ungenial version of Sir Ector in T.H. White’s Sword in the Stone). As Thomas Boleyn, Anne’s father, puts it in The Mirror and the ...”

“... a prototype television in a cupboard?’ In time she grew accustomed to blind TV – now she’ll even listen to In Our Time with some enthusiasm, although I’m not convinced she’ll ever be quite enough of a dilettante to surrender fully to a programme that instructs rather than educates, and flatters its listeners ...”

“... second, until she and her family, long suspected of plots against the regime, were destroyed. The French ambassador said she was ‘above eighty years old’ when Henry VIII had her beheaded, while the Imperial ambassador said she was ‘nearly ninety’. In fact she was 67. The chronology defeated observers, as if her life stretched back into a fabulous era ...”

“... George Scott (to whom Hugh MacDiarmid would dedicate A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle) and a French lecturer at Glasgow University called Denis Saurat (who is often credited with giving the 1920s Scottish literary renaissance its name). Most important, ‘in the early winter of 1918 I met Willa Anderson … My marriage was the most fortunate event in my ...”

“... Abrams, Ahmed Chalabi, Ayad Allawi, Rick Santorum, Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, Richard Armitage, Katherine Harris, Ken Mehlman, Paul O’Neill, Rush Limbaugh. Barely appearing at all are John Ashcroft, Samuel Alito, Ari Fleischer, Alberto Gonzales, Denny Hastert, John Negroponte and Tom Ridge. Condi and Colin Powell are given small parts, but Rummy is ...”

“... of William Drummond; the Dublin of James Shirley; the Wales of Morgan Llwyd, Henry Vaughan and Katherine Philips; the Munster of Roger Boyle; the Edinburgh of Sir George Mackenzie and William Cleland; the Derry of William Philips. Its historical scope is just as broad. After a final chapter on Daniel Defoe’s activities in Edinburgh in 1706-7, where he ...”