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“... today might well be surprised by its liveliness. As you’d expect, Theologus and Philagathus are keen on preaching, church attendance and private devotion, and take a hard line on ignorance and sin. Theologus preaches a standard predestinarian Calvinism, which at the turn of the 17th century had not yet taken on the anti-establishment associations it would ...”

“... spectacle’ in Paris and attempted to protect several Huguenot friends at some risk to himself. Keen to emphasise Walsingham’s high ideals, Cooper contrasts his choice of exile with the nicodemite conduct of his future colleague William Cecil, who opted for compromise when Mary came to the throne and even accepted the Mass in his private chapel to secure ...”

“... and is impossible to reconcile with his limited educational attainments – something Hale is very keen to emphasise. ‘No Renaissance artist, with the exception of Andrea Mantegna, was able to read or write Latin.’ This is a bold claim, considering how little we know about most artists of that period, and not hard to challenge (Alberti wrote a treatise in ...”

“... Thomas’s essential narrative of a culture becoming modern is derived in no small part from a keen appreciation of Hobbes’s scepticism. Even as social and cultural historians were establishing the power dynamics and belief systems of early modern England, another group of historians was turning to Hobbes in order to carve out a different agenda. Rather ...”

“... as the Cambridge School, inaugurated a contextualist revolution. The school’s founding father, Peter Laslett, pointed out the errors and anachronisms of political philosophers who paid no attention to the genesis of the texts they studied. Although Locke’s Two Treatises of Government wasn’t published until after the Glorious Revolution of ...”

“... and naturalist Thomas Jefferson, who cherished a vision of prehistoric American greatness and were keen to establish that America had indeed once supported giants. What happened in Madrid had an enduring significance: it was ‘the first reconstruction of an entire extinct animal’, long before reconstructed dinosaurs, mastodons and sabre-toothed tigers ...”

“... the best of them began to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only have been worth catching if they’d been on it in ...”

“... they were so much cleverer than the Romans, but they never told the Romans this.’ (That is in Peter Clarke’s book.) He won’t have been serious; but the levity of the remark suggests that the fall of the empire wasn’t upsetting him too much. The inevitability of the end of empire was accepted mainly because it was so blindingly obvious to all save ...”

“... recent years that reading has been challenged by academics, critics and some theatre practitioners keen to question the play’s impact and legacy. They have argued for the rehabilitation of the supposedly moribund theatrical culture that preceded Look Back in Anger, proposed alternative agents for the great changes in the British theatre which undoubtedly ...”

“... him in America in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, which is more pungently caught in the oral biography Peter Manso produced in 1985, yet Lennon often puts his finger on the kind of detail that makes sense of Mailer’s character. Pearl Kazin (Alfred Kazin’s sister) was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and her manner was said to be quite superior. She deployed it ...”

“... Prince’s androgyny if he’d wanted to – even with that Princess Di shag cut – but he was keen to show he was a grown man, a proper album artist, not an inoffensive, family-friendly pop idol.To launch his solo career he adopted a late-1970s Meatpacking District persona: hairy chest, tight jeans, Western boots, leather jacket, aviators, white ...”

“... of enslaving the imperial soul – the indignity and perplexity is captured with good humour by Peter Reading: I used to pepper my poetics with sophisticated allusions to dear Opera and divine Art (one was constantly reminded of A. du C. Dubreuil’s libretto for Piccinni’s Iphigenia in Tauris; one was constantly reminded of Niccolo di Bartolomeo da ...”

“... Lopez refers approvingly to ‘the beginner’s mind to which Buddhists aspire’. His keen attention suggests the ‘mindfulness’ of Zen practitioners, a connection made explicit in Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, which is ‘nature writing’ and Buddhist primer in roughly equal proportions. Thoreau ...”

“... in New York, attracting a disproportionate amount of financial support from a new breed of keen young collectors, with Charles Saatchi at the helm. These favoured artists are the so-called masters of Post-Modernism. If anyone tells you that there is no such thing as Post-Modernism, because there was never any such thing as Modernism, sit them down in ...”

“... or a ‘challenge’. Old age holds out promises as well as threats. Many are living to enjoy what Peter Laslett has termed the Third Age: a period of health, often lasting as long as childhood and adolescence together, free from the anxieties of child-care and the pressures of work. Out of such elders, remote from the stereotypes of decrepitude, may come a ...”