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“... impressive book, Shakespeare Restored, challenging what he saw as the errors and complacencies of Alexander Pope’s 1725 edition of the works, and offering many examples of his own editorial skills, particularly in the elucidation of difficult or corrupt passages. So his exalted claims for the provenance of Double Falsehood seemed to carry some ...”

“... the towering achievement of his minister Thomas Cromwell, whose idea it was to declare UDI on the pope, and, in effect, the rest of Europe. Not all of those who came next, including his own pupils, agreed with Elton. Some very publicly disagreed, and Cromwell was in danger of being sealed back into the sarcophagus which had contained his remains for five ...”

“... overwhelming odds to achieve the fulfilment of the ideals he believed in. The great Russian exile, Alexander Herzen, credited him with ‘an infinity of persistence and strength of will’: ‘Such men do not give in, do not yield; the worse things go with them, the higher they hold the flag ... In this inflexible steadfastness, in this faith which goes ...”

“... broke, in 1441, that an Ethiopian delegation was to attend that year’s Council of Florence. The Pope was reportedly much moved, even though the delegation turned out to consist of no more than two monks, sent not by any Ethiopian monarch but by their local community in Jerusalem. Interest in Ethiopia was, however, by then well and truly aroused – and ...”

“... after all, had actually begun as a science: in the work of the 18th-century philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, it represented a systematic investigation into human perception and sensation. The work of art could be seen as the paradigm of a new kind of rationality, one in which the sensory and the spiritual, the individual and the universal, were ...”

“... reputations. Joseph, the pious Bavarian, who had grown up to become Cardinal Ratzinger and then Pope Benedict XVI, appalled the Muslim world and many liberal Catholics by quoting a Byzantine emperor’s insults to the Prophet Muhammad. The Danzig lad, who had become Germany’s best-known writer and a Nobel Prize winner, the scourge of those who kept quiet ...”

“... perineal secretions for the manufacture of perfume. It is not quite the milieu of Fielding or Pope. It was rumoured that he kept a set of ropes and ladders handy should the debt collector come to call. His creditors hounded him, and he was committed to Fleet Prison as a bankrupt. On his release he decided that words were a more lucrative commodity than ...”

“... it could be explained by reference to his known medical condition. That he had taken up the Alexander technique, accounting for his distinctive posture, was not publicised until later. That he wore flat heels might have been noted by a quizzical eye. That he was a devotee of knitting was not a foible widely reported at that time. That Cripps did any of ...”

“... cropped up in British courts in medieval times; that Madame Tussaud was born Marie Grosholtz; that Pope Urban VIII changed the horseflies on his family coat of arms to bees; that mead doesn’t taste very nice; that Alexander the Great may have been mummified in honey, but then again he may not; that honey from bees which ...”

“... and for each patron a map-maker. The most persistent advocate of the Great Southern Continent, Alexander Dalrymple, was convinced that a land-bridge connected Australia either to New Guinea to the north, or to the paradise de Quiros had named Austrialia del Espiritu Santo to the east. On his first voyage Cook was carrying maps by the French cartographer ...”

“... Alexandre Stourdza et l’Europe de la Sainte-Alliance, a study of the diplomat and thinker Alexander Sturdza – father a Romanian boyar, mother a Phanariot Greek – in the era of the European Restoration.2Secretary in his twenties to Ioannis Capodistrias, Alexander I’s Greek envoy to the Congress of Vienna, with ...”

“... dictatorship, with the return of the censor and the secret police. The Russian socialist exile Alexander Herzen, who witnessed the revolution and counter-revolution in Paris, was heartbroken. He recognised that 1848 had left Europe’s ancient order of blindly deferential monarchy in ruins. But what would replace it? In unforgettable words, Herzen ...”

“... Trinity is more gracious in its arrangements. If you want to see a fine Henry Moore and a dashing Alexander Calder adorning a campus, see them in Trinity. It begins to appear that University College has adopted Trinity’s vice, and has become, for quite different reasons, complacent. McDowell and Webb have written the history of Trinity as if it were an ...”

“... most histories it is Alaric’s Goths who storm the city and Attila’s Huns who are deflected by Pope Leo, or by rumours of the plague. It then moves to a review of previous English dictionaries, beginning with Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall of 1604, which explains ‘hard vsuall English wordes’ borrowed from Latin and other languages, some now ...”

“... everybody – is talking about handbags with the intensity of cardinals appointing a new pope,’ an English journalist wrote during London Fashion Week in 2006. (Of course, the ‘everybody’ both Lagerfeld and the journalist are talking about doesn’t embrace those whom democracy hasn’t included in the right to eat sufficiently or be housed or ...”