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“... altered. Those who study it seem obsessed, as they always have been, with battles and bureaucracy. Christopher Duffy’s main preoccupation is with the first. There are 41 pages of battle maps, and the minutiae of every engagement Frederick the Great fought are chronicled and analysed in the loving detail familiar from the author’s other books. In what ...”

“... that invariably comes with our confident discovery in the past of patterns and developments. Christopher Duffy even provides a map of the likely troop movements to the north of London, making graphically real the imaginary confrontation with which I began. He counts out all the groups of soldiers that would have been involved and tries to estimate ...”

“... Eamon Duffy’s celebrated The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400-c.1580 (1992), which opened our eyes to the vitality of late medieval English Catholicism, was a book born when its author learned to drive. The motor car diverted him from other historical pursuits and took him to those East Anglian churches which, after a century of drastic iconoclasm, and a later century of Victorian ‘restoration’, still conserve so many precious vestiges of that old religion ...”

“... of 1555, ‘thither came … Fruiterers wyth horse loades of Cherries, and sold them.’ Eamon Duffy says: ‘We should not project modern sensibilities onto the people of the past.’ But in a cruel world, these were exemplary cruelties. Those who saw 11 men and two women burned together in June 1556 are unlikely, he says, ever to have forgotten it. What ...”

“... age. In Metroland, one of Barnes’s many frighteningly sensible women points out to the narrator, Christopher Lloyd, that the attraction of the idea of fast-forwarding to a sprightly 65 might have something to do with fearing the responsibilities of adult life – a fear that he eventually overcomes. Jean Serjeant, thanks to a loveless postwar marriage, is ...”

“... or shame, for instance, that made Eric Blair rechristen himself at the start of his career? As Christopher Hollis tells us: ‘The reasons he gave for changing his name are oddly unconvincing. He complained that Blair was a Scots name and that he disliked Scotland because of its association with the deer forests about which his rich schoolfellows used to ...”

“... and Janice Galloway’s Foreign Parts. It bridges writing as different as the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy or David Kinloch, and the fiction of Christopher Whyte or A.L. Kennedy. Some of these poets and novelists are wary of each other. Jamie recently refused to read with Irvine Welsh because of what she saw as ...”

“... Twenty years ago, when Maureen Duffy first published The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn, 1640-89, Behn was still known principally as the celebrated but largely unread founder of women’s writing, the figure who had been hymned but effectively dismissed by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own (1929). ‘All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds,’ Woolf wrote, only to declare Behn’s actual writings to be so much cheerful hack-work, of interest only as the hack-work of a woman ...”

“... rules. Whatever popes or preachers might say, for ordinary people miraculous protectors like St Christopher mattered more than founders of the faith like St Paul. Like the secular folk tales they often resembled, the legends of the saints swam in the opposite direction from Christian orthodoxy, because rather than ‘offer logical explanations’, they gave ...”

“... Dickens half a century ago described a Marian ‘reaction’, a posse of historians led by Eamon Duffy, Christopher Haigh, John Edwards and Loades himself have found a reformation as full of potential as anything that Protestants did, indeed the largest-scale attempt to restore Catholicism up till then in all Europe. We ...”

“... fiat. Few characters in the ensuing story are interested in the disputed election result. Annabel Duffy, an idealistic African American intern at an independent film company called Means of Production, is too busy placating her boss to follow the news. Vanessa, the boss, is Rosa Elisabetta’s daughter, and a stressful morning taking her mother to hospital ...”

“... more representative of the state of 16th-century history: Natalie Zemon Davis, David Cressy, Eamon Duffy. More privately, there is the story he tells us in his prologue about his acceding, if sheepishly, to the unspoken wishes of his dead father by saying Kaddish for him. Which seems a more human response than his refusal, recorded in the epilogue to ...”

“... concludes: ‘I see Milosz calls poetry a dividend from ourselves: high yields, mon vieux.’ Christopher Reid, the editor of this weighty selection of Heaney’s correspondence, adds disconcertingly: ‘Below the signature, in Mahon’s hand, on the actual letter in the Emory archive: “Pompous ass”.’ Was it unguarded of Heaney to take such ...”

“... the millennial gift books already piling up on remainder tables, 1999 marked the appearance of Christopher Ricks’s successor to Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse, published a hundred years ago, revised in 1939, and followed in 1972 by Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book; of the Longman Anthology of British Literature, a brashly ...”

“... to those who have one without the other. Those who have both will find that, among contemporaries, Christopher Reid and Michael Hofmann are classified as love poets but Craig Raine and Tony Harrison as blue versifiers. Only a few poets make both, including Seamus Heaney, who has two poems unworthy of him in the Whitworth (one about unfreezing a vaginal ...”