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“... him of the thousand copies of his first book of poetry, Terminal Moraine (1972), many of which lay throughout the decade in the basement of his publishers, Secker and Warburg: that is where I picked up my copy, and Fenton eventually bought up the unsold stock himself, believing (rightly) that he’d make a better job of disseminating it. His next ...”

“... discredit Lawrence’s advocacy of sexual polarity. Balbert catches them quoting out of context: Paul Morel’s patronising view of the suffrage movement is not Lawrence’s, but part of a dialogue with Clara Dawes which will eventually reveal Clara’s emotional failure; Miriam Leivers’s polemic against sexual inequality reveals her lack of ‘healthy ...”

“... Paul Celan​ was born in 1920 and died in 1970. The symmetry of these dates, arranged around the end of the Second World War, seems cruelly freighted, as does the fact that Celan chose to end his life on Hitler’s birthday. Celan – he gave himself the name by inverting the order of the syllables of his original surname, Antschel – grew up in Czernowitz, then part of Romania, now part of Ukraine ...”

“... strangeness of how quickly the Society gained official endorsement and a legal identity from Pope Paul III in 1540. Here was a proposed corporation that proclaimed no special purpose beyond being ‘beneficial to souls’; some of its efforts had already petered out in fiasco, one being the launch of a mission of Christian evangelism to Ottoman-ruled ...”

“... the removal of faith in its nuclear programme played a major part in its eventual downfall. Piers Paul Read picks out, then weaves, these two themes with skill and sometimes – notably in his description of the explosion itself – with the vigour of a superior thriller writer. He seems to tire towards the end, which fades into a rehearsal of the failed coup ...”

“... Reformation, Johann Sleidan, thought it remarkable that the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, could lay claim to be another Charles the Great because of what this insignificant man had done in a hole in a corner of his wide dominions. Luther became the incarnate legend of God’s strength made perfect in human weakness: the Bible story of Gideon, or of the ...”

“... time to pull down their cowshed and build a visitors’ centre. At the Vatican, however, Pope John Paul II disregarded a petition to complete Hildegard’s formal canonisation process (aborted in 1243) and declare her a doctor of the Church. Evidently, this most uppity of medieval women is not a model the Pope wants to raise up for emulation in the new ...”

“... in Westminster Hall and claim it as his own. Richard’s empty throne stands at the heart of Paul Strohm’s fine study of the textual consequences of the Lancastrian usurpation. It is both a material presence, a space to be occupied and defended by the victorious Henry, and a permanent void, a metonym for the legitimacy that the early Lancastrian kings ...”

“... of an index? Scholars have recently become very interested in the historian of philosophy, Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905-99), who studied with the last great generation of German philologists. He himself told me two stories about those days: that he had learned to speak Latin properly in Werner Jaeger’s seminar in Berlin, and still admired Jaeger’s ...”

“... a mandate to crack down on the powerful tax-evaders, or to persuade them that their own interest lay in the creation of at least a minimally functioning state. August showed us conclusively that Yeltsin’s heart was not in it; indeed, his heart was only barely functioning at all. There has been no change of President under the present constitution, and ...”

“... an older man, also lying motionless on his mattress. At first I think he might be dead, but as I lay my double-gloved hand gently on his shoulder, he turns his head to look up at me. His eyes are sunken and his lips parched, his skin flattening only slowly when pinched. He is severely dehydrated from the profuse diarrhoea common with Ebola. Usually a drip of ...”

“... of fashionable portraits – among those in the exhibition are the young Ranuccio Farnese, Pope Paul III and Titian’s friend and publicist Pietro Aretino. The last two are remarkable for the way they use clothes as a kind of landscape – the Pope’s cape rising like a hill to support the head and Aretino’s rich velvet coat crossing his body in a ...”

“... this babble of words and definitions and excitement about holy images. Behind the Reformation lay the overriding concern of medieval Europe: salvation from eternal death and torment after the physical end of our brief lives on earth. Providing salvation was the business of the Church, the ‘Catholic’ Church, whose complex of institutions and activities ...”

“... although many distinguished studies of the subject have appeared since (by historians such as Paul Preston, Raymond Carr and Martin Blinkhorn, to mention three British examples). My memories of Homage to Catalonia were not only of the fine, evocative writing, perhaps Orwell’s best, but of his enthusiasm for the people with whom he had lived and ...”

“... sacred and secular power, lies the whole meaning of the Abbey. It is also the subject matter of Paul Binski’s subtle, learned and absorbing book. The origins of the Abbey – to be precise, the Collegiate Church of St Peter in Westminster – are shrouded in uncertainty. A Saxon foundation on Thorney Island, the one dry spot in the fenland that once ...”