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“... invokes Lytton Strachey (twice!) as an exemplar in the writing of history and quotes with approval Samuel Butler’s ‘I never write on any subject unless I believe the opinion of those who have the ear of the public to be mistaken’? Moreover, Pipes’s historical work has challenged a variety of received opinions: that 1917 was a social revolution; that ...”

“... Not long after​ the First World War, the movie baron Samuel Goldwyn set up a stable of Eminent Authors in an attempt to give silent screenplays more literary weight. One of the recruits was the Nobel Prize-winning Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck. Initially, neither party seems to have been troubled that Maeterlinck spoke no English, and the great Belgian set to work on a screen version of his novel La Vie des Abeilles ...”

“... elder, Gertie, grows up and gets married but is always unwell. She comes under the influence of Baron R**, a mesmerist, who claims he can help her, and seems to do so with the assistance of a medium, a young woman who turns out to be … her lost sister! The confusing difference in their appearance – Catherine’s extremely large feet – is accounted for ...”

“... own feelings, would trouble himself to walk the length of the street in which he lived to secure Baron Rothschild’s admission into the House of Commons’. The popular view of Emancipation sees the Whigs, Liberals, Benthamites, Evangelists, and Macaulay, ranged on the side of the Jews, against the Tories, the Church of England, the aristocracy and the ...”

“... to know something of the record of these soldiers in German service. This is where the book by Samuel Newland might have helped, but falls seriously short. He became interested in the Wehrmacht Cossacks in 1973, twenty years after their ‘story’ began, and has delved into their official and to some extent their oral records. His conscientious findings ...”

“... on his door and came straight in, saying: ‘Usborne? I’m Lord Hastings, y’know.’ The 21st baron signed him on to tutor his son at Melton Constable Park, a Blandings-style establishment in Norfolk. Here he learned to sit on a chair without his back touching it, was served by white-gloved footmen, and for the first and last time took a lady to dinner in ...”

“... and thus more pleasingly. Compare: ‘On fait de son mieux pour faire ses devoirs soi-même.’Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the posthumously published Anima Poetae, argued that ‘it’ was the right pronoun for referring to indefinite nouns like ‘everyone’ or ‘the person’, ‘in order to avoid particularising man or woman, or in order to express ...”

“... reaction to Canudos. Cunha’s extraordinary Os Sertoes (translated from the Portuguese in 1944 by Samuel Putnam as Rebellion in the Backlands) came out in 1902, the year of Heart of Darkness, and Conrad’s confrontation of civilised and primitive in a remote interior does not so perilously trace the painful raw edge of the topic as does ‘this monstrous ...”

“... London’ as it follows its picaresque anti-hero, Buckram, through the alleys. Martin portrays Samuel Johnson’s black servant, Francis Barber, as ‘a nouveau-riche social climber’, and both Sancho and Equiano are depicted in suitably unheroic fashion. Sandhu loves all this, though the passages he quotes don’t quite live up to his extravagant ...”

“... Aspects of Fascism had contained a foreword by Mussolini, and who was regarded even by Sir Samuel Hoare, the Foreign Secretary who gave his name to the notorious Hoare-Laval Pact, as ‘an ardent Italian propagandist.’ Barnes subsequently adopted Italian nationality and broadcast from Italy in support of the Fascists during World War Two. Evelyn ...”

“... wrote in her diary, then set about to turn the matter to her advantage. Her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, published barely a year after his death, had to be reprinted four times within the year. Outraged by what he saw as her malice, her self-serving and her inaccuracy, Boswell set instantly to work on his Life of ...”

“... and provides a summary of Myddelton’s account with the Crown, audited in 1630 by James Weston, baron of the exchequer. The New River Board also persistently declined to supply any technical historical information to the Institute of Engineers. Ward, however, has gone back to the original figures, from which he has worked out the size of the workforce, the ...”

“... pseudonyms. Many of them were anagrams of his name – like German Schleifheim von Sulsfort and Samuel Greiffnsohn vom Hirschfeld. It was only in 1837, 150 years after the novel first appeared, that the scholar Heinrich Kurz showed that its author must have been Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen – but identifying him didn’t get us very ...”

“... of that tempestuous decade. Political Justice took its theme from the Marquis de Condorcet, Baron d’Holbach, Volney, Diderot and the other great Enlighteners of pre-Revolutionary France. Human beings, it asserts, are above all perfectible. They need look nowhere else for improvement but to themselves. Women are equal to men. Religion is ...”

“... of limited competitive entry to the civil service was crucial. Life, for the hosiery manufacturer Samuel Morley, was ‘really a continued competitive examination’. But all depended on who chose the syllabus, set the questions and marked the answers. Entrepreneurial politicians soon grasped that the new examinations for the public service were not designed ...”