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“... of knights was so different from that of the church clerks whom they seemed to disdain. Professor Barlow’s sterling new biography of Thomas Becket shows us a man whose origins, like William’s, were not of the highest: his father ‘may have been in textiles’. Like William, Thomas owed his rise, not to inheritance, but to his being sent to the household ...”

“... as Urban II in the 11th century, Calixtus II in the 12th and Gregory IX in the 13th. As Professor Barlow reminds us in an essay reprinted in his new collection, it was Calixtus II who canonised Hugh Abbot of Cluny in 1120. It was Gregory IX who both set up the Inquisition and formalised the rules of procedure for canonisation. I doubt whether this was ...”

“... are a case in point.) He often sounds like a character in a comic novel. His own. Roger Barlow in Seventy-Two Virgins is a self-portrait that reveals a surprising degree of self-awareness:Barlow’s thoughts of political extinction had taken a philosophical turn. Did it matter? Of course not. The fate of the human ...”

“... pen portraits published in 1927. Channon also formed an intense attachment to Bobbie Pratt Barlow, a rich young Coldstreamer who, Heffer tells us, was later known for his house at Taormina ‘staffed entirely by prepubescent boys’.Channon spent most of 1920 and 1921 at Oxford, for social rather than academic purposes, but he either didn’t keep any ...”