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“... in as a troubleshooter to deal with the privies at Theobalds and Hampton Court. Harington was much more than a hygienist, however. Indeed, most of his works try to achieve rather too much at once. The Metamorphosis of Ajax is part DIY manual and part minor – and sometimes malodorous – comic masterpiece. Amid endless Rabelaisian jests about privies, it ...”

“... give each other a lot of information, in unmodulated voices, each time they speak. Higginbotham is more comfortable with biography, but this has not deterred her publisher from dressing up her new book like a historical novel of the type she doesn’t much like, with a moody wash of colour and a woman with trailing skirts and half a head. Margaret Pole’s ...”

“... into the atmosphere. The eruption of Mount Laki in June 1783 presented Benjamin Franklin with a more serious problem. As Gillen D’Arcy Wood recounts, Franklin was in Paris the following spring, negotiating peace terms with the British. ‘The makeshift US capital in Annapolis, Maryland, was snowbound, preventing assembly of congressional delegates to ...”

“... do you remember since we lay all night in the Windmill in Saint George’s Field? SIR JOHN: No more of that, good Master Shallow, no more of that. SHALLOW: Ha, ’twas a merry night! And is Jane Nightwork alive? SIR JOHN: She lives, Master Shallow. The italicised words, found in the Folio, are not in the Quarto of ...”

“... whether that was his birth name at all. In Delhi, the theologian Abdul-Haqq Dehlavi listed more than four hundred names for him. ‘I am only the son of a woman from the Quraysh,’ the prophet is reported to have said, ‘who used to eat dried meat.’ In the Vita Mahumeti, from around 1100, Embrico of Mainz recounted the life of Mammutius, a magician ...”

“... on Elizabeth’s life. Young Bess had Jean Simmons in the lead. Hemmed in by Stewart Granger as Thomas Seymour and Charles Laughton reprising his prewar role as Henry VIII, there isn’t much Simmons can do beyond tossing her hair and striking a curious hands-on-hips Holbeinesque pose to suggest that there is more to her ...”

“... might prefer to collaborate rather than compete as their sense of being under siege grows more desperate is swept aside by the dogma that everything is automatically improved by the Midas touch of competition. It’s true that students have always competed for places and degrees, universities for the ‘best’ students, researchers for funding and so ...”

“... that his publishers did not find someone to help him to produce an edition which would have been more useful to its readers. One day, the work will have to be done all over again. It makes an ironic contrast with E.S. de Beer’s six-volume edition of Evelyn’s Diary (1955), one of the most meticulous pieces of literary scholarship ever produced. Yet, for ...”

“... he was being lionised elsewhere in Europe by the new Protestant champions of Greek philology. Sir Thomas More and Erasmus (also honoured with an appearance in the Index) were both keen translators and literary imitators of Lucian. His supporters saw him as a clear-thinking and free-speaking opponent of flummery, as well as a brilliant stylist and ...”

“... unpleasant body odours than their descendants do now. If so, this was bad luck, for they were much more likely to encounter them than we are in our deodorised world.In the tenth century the Welsh ruler Hywel Dda allowed wives a marital separation if their husbands had stinking breath. In later centuries, books on courtesy warned readers against inflicting ...”

“... ballad which the opera singer Jenny Lind made wildly popular. Ten years later the great antiquary Thomas Wright published his History of Domestic Manners and Sentiments in England during the Middle Ages. Reissued in 1871 as The Homes of Other Days, it contained more than three hundred illustrations drawn from medieval ...”

“... to his subject: ‘I had no “method”, only an omnium gatherum of materials culled from more or less everywhere.’ Most of us would say the same.But how do we deal with this omnium gatherum when we have got it? We can’t keep it all in our heads. Macaulay claimed that his memory was good enough to enable him to write out the whole of Paradise ...”

“... Britain on the opening night of the Hockney exhibition in early February. It inched forward, a few more guests at a time; at the back people craned their heads trying to work out the reason for the bottleneck – or gave up and went to get a drink in one of the galleries off the octagonal hall at the centre of the building. The explanation was Hockney ...”

“... debates, court and cabinet scandals, and so on. But poetry engages with power relations at much more profound levels: class and regional registers of discourse, rhythm, deep-rooted metaphorical structurings of social experience and sexual relations. On a broad definition of the word, all these things are political; on a narrow definition, politics is a ...”

“... A copy of the Koran?’ Setting off the alarm at the security check, I was searched much more thoroughly than I’d ever been before. The official had a good look at the soles of my shoes, to make sure that I wasn’t doing a Richard Reid, planning to detonate the semtex I was walking on at 35,000 feet. We had a meal as we waited for our flight to be ...”