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“... During the Christmas celebrations of 1251, Henry III and his court ate their way through 830 deer of various kinds, 200 wild swine, 1300 hares and 115 cranes. Basic supplies for the feast to mark the installation of George Neville as Archbishop of York in 1467 began with 104 oxen, 1000 sheep, 10,000 capons and six wild bulls, washed down with a hundred barrels of wine ...”

“... So violent and motley was life that it bore the mixed smell of blood and of roses.’ Helen Castor quotes Johan Huizinga’s description of the waning of the Middle Ages at the very end of her book, with something approaching a denial of its relevance to her own account of the same period. ‘Blood and roses’ suggests violence and sex – or at least violence and sentimentality ...”

“... Yes, yes, Mr Burne-Jones,’ Benjamin Jowett is reputed to have said as he inspected the artist’s newly completed Arthurian murals in the Oxford Union, ‘but what does one do with the Grail once one has found it?’ This sounds almost as much the definitive question as the Grail was the definitive quest, but Jowett’s objection is more radically misconceived than any answer could be ...”

“... This is the story of a goatherd who progressed through destitution and self-education to become the printer of the first edition of Calvin’s greatest work and one of the most respected teachers in Reformation Switzerland. It is also the story of his son, who trained as a doctor, fostered a household of four children, and died leaving 42 musical instruments, a set of skeletons and other bones of creatures from mouse to mammoth (he believed the latter to have belonged to a huge man), a tulip garden, artefacts from across the whole of the newly-discovered globe, stuffed crocodiles and a live elk that doubled as a lawnmower ...”

“... John Skelton should be one of the great figures of English poetry. He is widely regarded as the most significant poet in the 130 years between the death of Chaucer and the flourishing of Thomas Wyatt; but it has to be said that the competition for the top ranking south of the Scottish border is not very fierce, and until the 1930s such a judgment would have struck most people as bizarre ...”

“... The season was spring, trees Were sprouting leaves, meadows Were green, every morning Birds sang in their own Sweet language, and the world was joyful. And the son of the widowed lady Living alone in the Barren Forest rose, and quickly Saddled his hunting horse . . . In these lines we are introduced to the hero of Chrétien de Troyes’s last romance, written late in the 12th century ...”

“... In 1644, the Puritan cleric John Shaw journeyed up to Westmorland to instruct the local people, who, he had been told, were sadly lacking in knowledge of the Bible. The need was confirmed when he interrogated an old man whose long life in the wake of the Reformation seemed to have left him entirely ignorant of all matters theological and ecclesiastical ...”

“... Some 25 years after Alsace had been returned to France at the end of the Second World War, I took an opportunity to work there for a few months, in the belief that it would improve my French. A few bare facts about the contested history of the region had stayed with me from school history lessons, but they couldn’t have prepared me for what I walked into ...”

“... a pair of genuinely nasty Furies, a clown, some melodious harvesters, and a strange talking head. Helen Cooper mentions Peele’s play glancingly on two occasions, describing it as ‘a compendium of everyone’s favourite motifs from popular romance and folk tale’. That implies a generic distinction between the two forms. But romance, whether popular ...”

“... Jilly Cooper​ ’s work is not, so far as I know, much studied in universities. In the Senior Combination Room one lunchtime recently, when I mentioned that I was writing this review, a Very Senior Person slumped forward with his head in his hands, muttering: ‘Oh no, soft porn!’ Other people either laugh, or look quizzically at me and hurry away ...”

“... for help. ‘You heard?’ a freak-show owner (Willem Dafoe) says to Stanton Carlisle (Bradley Cooper): ‘That little kraut, the one that looks like Chaplin? He just invaded Poland.’ If we’re thinking magically, this is a glimpse of the still unmade The Great Dictator (1940); otherwise, it’s a common comparison that Chaplin chose to invert. Neither ...”

“... that one of the leading proponents and fundraisers for the project had been Susanna Ashley-Cooper, née Noel, Countess of Shaftesbury. It became clear that she was also the ringleader of a previously shadowy group, the Shakespeare Ladies Club, which from the mid-1730s lobbied theatre managements to stage more Shakespeare; she had also encouraged Sir ...”

“... about Miliband and the deficit would vote for Corbyn. ‘My hunch,’ she wrote on 23 July, ‘is Cooper is the one to beat.’ As reality set in, her hunch became a plea, in which she was joined by the paper itself: in its editorial of 13 August, the Guardian came out for the ‘steadfast’ Cooper. These editorials, the ...”

“... powerful impression on us than our awareness of the suffering of Betty and her children? Sterling Cooper, the fictional advertising agency around which Mad Men is built, is a caricature of the commercial TV system that produced the series: a pool of creative people in bitter thrall to the accountants and deal-makers they rely on for money. Although we learn ...”

“... was accomplished painlessly. Reagan began the 1950 California Senate campaign as a supporter of Helen Gahagan Douglas – slandered by her opponent, Nixon, as the ‘Pink Lady’ – but ended it as a patron of Nixon. Looking back, he would give this transition a more compelling gloss and allude darkly to the period when he had to carry a gun in ...”