“... turn my back. What is it that makes this discomfiture inescapable? Evidently, Bloomsbury makes a strong salespoint because it’s a story with a strong mixture of ingredients: sex, friendships, betrayals, glam connections, nice locations, eccentric personalities, the odd suicide, a touch of politics, more sex ...”

“... revolutions associated with Simón Bolívar broke out after 1811, he worried that without strong ties to Spain the educated elite in colonial societies would be too small to foster the civilised society he prized. Political independence was not, as he saw it, a valid goal, particularly in places where non-Europeans were likely to outnumber creole ...”

“... and political passage through the first half of the 19th century: Schiller, Hegel, Saint-Simon, Fourier, George Sand, Feuerbach, Louis Blanc and, crucially, Proudhon. The young Herzen, awed and fascinated by European ideas and achievements, tended to blame the tsars for his country’s pitiable backwardness. The Slavophiles and gradualists who ...”

“... watchmaker deity who honours no warranties, while new societies of ‘spiritists’, particularly strong in America, Britain and France, studied reincarnation and the transmigration of souls. Amateur chemists of the immortal, they analysed ethereal matter and conjured up elements like the périsprit, which, as Kselman observes, seems to have drifted across ...”

“... capitalism tempered by a Calvinist discomfort or guilt about worldly rewards? This, the theme of Simon Schama’s Embarrassment of Riches, is not inconsistent with the view that moral warnings against worldly pleasures lurk beneath the surfaces of the paintings. Dutch art in this account is an art of proscribing, not an art of describing. Combined with the ...”

“... one of the paper’s firebrands, nor even an electric orator, but the response from the 130-strong staff is prolonged, emotional applause. The most startling contribution to the meeting comes from the paper’s young property correspondent, the normally shy Caroline McGhie: ‘Do you realise,’ she asks Andrew Neil, ‘that you have betrayed your own ...”

“... gloss on Trump’s philosophy. In the first pages of his memoir, The Room Where It Happened (Simon and Schuster, £25), Bolton takes pains to lay out how busy he was before joining the Trump administration and how eagerly Trump’s team pursued him. The first jobs he was offered in the administration were not big or important enough: he turned down ...”

“... in the Great War, with a minimum of accompanying social theory. When hostilities began, there was strong competition among upper-class women to found uniformed private armies of their own (this was long before the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps – the WAAC – was formed to serve in France). Eagerness was such that the redoubtable Dr Elsie Inglis had to be ...”

“... to concede. The question now became: what causes the secular acceleration of the Moon? Pierre-Simon Laplace discovered in 1776 that orbits would eventually degrade if, in contrast to Newton’s theory of instantaneous action at a distance, gravitational forces took time to propagate. Laplace’s insight was that the cumulative effect of the planets on the ...”

“... novel’ alongside Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008), Michel Butor (1926-2016) and Claude Simon (1913-2005). I am not sure that many people read any of them for pleasure these days. (In my more cynical moments, I don’t think anyone read them with much pleasure back then either.) We took for granted that the ‘new novel’ was crucially ...”

“... next century was, if possible, even worse. Henry III, his son Edward I and their enemy Simon de Montfort agreed on little else except the need to get rid of the Jews. De Montfort has clung on to his place in the English pantheon as the prime originator of parliamentary government. His role in murdering the entire Jewish population of London in 1264 ...”

“... be surprised by the sequel. Presented with a sensational document and an urgent need for secrecy, Simon and Schuster posted a proof copy to Roudedge at the Independent on Sunday’s office in the House of Commons, which wouldn’t have mattered if Routledge hadn’t left the paper a year earlier to join the Mirror. The envelope was opened and its contents ...”

“... If it were true, as we are incessantly told, that the monarchy has ‘no real power’ but a strong sense of constitutional probity, then one might expect to find some evidence that the King-in-waiting was warned to be circumspect. But there’s not a hint, in all of Ziegler’s industrious fossickings, of any concern on that score. There was some royal ...”

“... of colour changes which were not apparent to the untrained eye... for “if the temper was too strong... with the vehement blow of the hammer it flew in pieces; but if it was soft, it bowed, and would not touch the stone”.’ This ‘uncomplicated’ model of adolescence in other times and cultures has suffered blow after blow since Maitland’s time ...”

“... leaps from the early 1900s to the monstrosities committed in Middle Europe in another generation. Strong views strongly expressed are heard, especially if uttered by men of influence and status. Historians have to decide whether the situation was as disturbing as some evidence suggests. No one disputes the existence of eugenicist views in Edwardian and ...”