The interviewers must feel that some of the celebratedness rubs off onto them.

Geert Groote, founder of the Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life, was an enormously appealing, highly idiosyncratic figure of tremendous energy and talent – a man who did nothing, ever, by half measures.

A charge of 200 pounds of gunpowder, in bags merely laid at the foot of the stockade, untamped, was first exploded.

We have seen wonder-striking robes and dresses, Women whose nails and teeth the betel stains And jugglers whom the rearing snake caresses.