“... He has come into all the material collected by John Lehmann’s commissioned biographer, Martin Taylor, who died before he could write a word of it. He has seen photocopies of the extensive diaries, and he has interviewed the survivors and their descendants. Lehmann himself wrote three volumes of dignified autobiography about his work, his beliefs, his ...”

“... In Evelyn’s own day, young trees were more usually shipped from Holland. I come from what D.J. Taylor has called the ‘pavement-pounding’ school of biography, perhaps particularly because buildings and landscape have been my preoccupation for so long. When I was researching my biography of John Soane I worked in his own house, which he had ensured (by ...”

“... same all his life – Hampden, Swift, Hazlitt, Cobden, Bright, Mill, Gladstone, Wilberforce and Charles James Fox. There was, in time, one great socialist addition to the pantheon, Aneurin Bevan. It followed that politics was mainly about two things: standing up for moral principle and making wonderful speeches. Any idea that it was also about perks and ...”

“... in the anti-Poor Law campaign (there is no reference to the charge recently made by Barbara Taylor that Chartists in general and O’Connorites in particular were indifferent and often hostile to women’s concerns). On Chartist policies Mrs Thompson challenges the conventional dichotomy between moral and physical-force Chartism, arguing that this was a ...”

“... with the book that made Mack Smith famous in Italy. When Cavour and Garibaldi appeared, A.J.P. Taylor said of it, ‘With brilliant, though well-founded perversity, Mr Mack Smith turns things upside down,’ and that was certainly part of the reason for its impact. The traditional view of the main actors in the drama of the Italian unification movement had ...”

“... Kocka, who saw the failure of the revolutions of 1848-49 as the turning point when, as A.J.P. Taylor quipped, German history failed to turn. While in other Western and Central European nations industrialisation and the defeat of the landed aristocracy were accompanied by the triumph of bourgeois liberalism, in Germany aristocracy and authoritarianism ...”

“... were striking. In most parts of the Holy Roman Empire, the Carolina Criminal Code promulgated by Charles V held good into the 17th century. It prescribed the death penalty not just for murder and treason, but for arson, blasphemy, counter-feiting, conjuring, witchcraft, abortion, rape, unnatural sex, highway robbery, robbery or attempted robbery with ...”

“... of a master mariner, and they had nine children between 1855 and 1870. The fifth was called Charles and the sixth Edward (lots of Greenes were). Charles became a schoolmaster, eventually the headmaster of the public school in Berkhamsted. He married his first cousin Marion Greene, and between 1896 and 1914 they ...”

“... as we know both from later memoirs about the passing on of the title role from Burbage to Joseph Taylor and from records of performances in the 1630s for Charles I’s court. Even after London’s playhouses were closed by the outbreak of Civil War in 1642, an anonymous adaptor produced a truncated version suitable for ...”

“... she was leaving open. The historian Seth Stein LeJacq has calculated that her brothers Francis and Charles, both of whom became admirals, served on at least ten naval sodomy trials between them, eight of these before Mansfield Park was published. And she wasn’t too delicate to risk such an allusion. Many years after Austen’s death, her favourite ...”

“... slimeRise and deride this sepulchre of crime.When war is claimed as a mother of invention (A.J.P. Taylor, Paul Virilio), that invention is hardly intended to signify the memorials that constitute a quintessential building type of the 1920s, albeit not much of one. Although medals were fashioned of different metals according to the status of the award, men ...”

“... and ‘servile court-tool’ who ‘goes the whole length of despotism’. Then there was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whom John Thelwall – a 1790s firebrand who did stick to his guns – remembered as being, in the heyday of Robespierre and Saint-Just, ‘a down right zealous leveller & indeed in one of the worst senses of the word … a Jacobin, a man of ...”

“... all the other literature-soaked rhetorics currently available. A neat chapter on the explorer John Charles Frémont serves to make a similar point: Fender shows Frémont moving between picturesque modes of writing and scientific recording – ‘sometimes the oscillation between the two modes is nervously rapid’ (‘nervous’ – what else!). There is a ...”

“... in 1904 did not happen again. The most influential anti-semite in the early years of the state was Charles Bewley. He was a Quaker convert to Catholicism, a senior counsel and diplomat. In 1921 he went to Berlin as Irish Consul. Within a year he was causing trouble. In a Berlin café he insulted Robert Briscoe, who was visiting, and the Jewish owner, and was ...”

“... the Oxford University Dramatic Society produced The Dynasts, Hardy wrote to the stage-manager, Charles Morgan, asking that, instead of being seated in the audience, he be placed ‘in some obscure box or (failing that) behind in the wings, from which I can come out at any time without notice’. The desiderated situation resembles that of the ...”