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“... by the Senate.’ Seager’s book contains no reflection of this striking testimony to the savage mutual competition which both fuelled and hampered the course of Roman conquest. Nor does it discuss what we can reconstruct of the presentation of Pompey by his Greek historian, Theophanes of Mytilene. Even a conventionally biographical approach could ...”

“... as group biography, since the principals have to share top billing with Mrs Inchbald, Sheridan, Thomas Lawrence and Mrs Jordan. There is a curious line of contact between several of these figures: four of them were the subjects of biographies by James Boaden (1762-1839), who happened also to edit Garrick’s letters. Ms Kelly mentions these lives in her ...”

“... or favourable one.’ Generally even his sourest observations carry some ring of truth: ‘Sir Thomas [Robinson] had been bred in German courts, and was rather restored than naturalised to the genius of that country: he had German honour, loved German politics, and could explain himself as little as if he spoke only German. He might have remained in ...”

“... before proceeding to John Selden (1584-1654) and William Dugdale (1605-86), and on to Thomas Hearne (1678-1735). Hearne was a quarrelsome man, sacked from his job in the Bodleian Library for his Jacobite sympathies. Pope devoted five lethal lines to him in the third book of The Dunciad, adopting Chaucerian English for his purpose: ‘But who is ...”

“... with them, continued to distribute their movies in Germany and even pandered to the Nazi regime. Thomas Doherty’s Hollywood and Hitler and Ben Urwand’s The Collaboration cover much the same ground while emphasising different aspects of the Hollywood-Hitler connection. Doherty sees the moguls who founded and ran most of the large movie studios as only one ...”

“... the historiography of Tudor England she has become a shadowy figure, a sad frump eclipsed by her savage husband and the brazen mistress who supplanted her. Giles Tremlett’s splendid biography seeks to correct that perception. Notoriously, Henry came to hate the cast-off wife he once doted on, but it’s Tremlett’s contention that when Henry made ...”

“... numbers, Origen, the Great War, puns, madrigals, nail-making, Nye Bevan, biplanes, God, Thomas Bradwardine, Platonism, Messiaen, hawthorns, forgotten martyrs, Iceland, the Virgin, Welsh history, laurels, prophecy, cabalism). The instant sources of delight are lines that reverberate in the mind (‘A solitary axe-blow that is the echo of a lost ...”

“... by Shakespeare’. This would have happened when Shakespeare’s company took on a Hamlet play by Thomas Kyd (or someone else), and didn’t know what to do with it because they were aware that this creaking old revenge stuff was desperately out of fashion. Shakespeare would have thought of the rewrite as ‘a pretty specialised assignment, a ...”

“... isn’t strictly true for this period, but seems to fit in other ways.) But for years the equally savage abuses by British officers and their African collaborators in the detention camps, controlled villages and courtrooms of Kenya were mostly hidden from people at home. They knew some of it – indeed, did what they could to put an end to it after the ...”

“... that ‘revolutions, or the calamities of kings have not formerly been odious to Mr Burke.’ Thomas Jefferson, who had been an eye-witness in Paris as Burke had not, declared that ‘the Revolution in France does not astonish me so much as the revolution of Mr Burke.’ Supporters of the Revolution like Paine and the Baron (‘Anacharsis’) Cloots had ...”

“... what she was going through? ‘Language has not yet been adjusted,’ reflected the physician, Thomas Beddoes, ‘with any degree of exactness, to our inward feelings.’ Miss Martineau’s tender womb certainly entered the public domain, and she was no slouch at what Post-Modernists now call ‘writing the body’; but for all that, the historian is left ...”

“... 1486, was meant to be amusing as well as alarming. The Late Lancashire Witches, a play of 1634 by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, was both subversive comedy and topical commentary. In each case, the witches are female, their bodies corruptible, their passions unbridled. They mock and menace patriarchal political order (in The Late Lancashire Witches a ...”

“... World, represented ‘the final struggle of the two races – the decisive death grapple of the savage and the civilised man ... with all its immense results’. What Prescott, Leutze and the critics all had in mind was a struggle nearer home. In the 1840s the final surge of European settlers into California was taking place, and across the continent wars ...”

“... agonised poet? Will they help us to make sense of the courtier and friend of Charles II who wrote savage republican verse? All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on, From the hector of France to the cully of Britain. What they will not do is to fulfil hopes perhaps raised by the word ‘unexpurgated’ in the publishers’ blurb. There are some ...”

“... It is like widows: the longer the old boy is gone the nicer he seems to have been. I think of Thomas Hardy’s first wife. They squabbled for years. He fell in love with another woman, wrote love poems about her. When the first died, and she really was a bit of a heap at the end (she wore boots), he married the second and started writing his love poems to ...”