“... down his pen, but for those more comfortable with plain writing in English, it began perhaps with William James deriding the ‘copy theory of truth’. This path has been increasingly followed of late; its most widely-read exposition is Richard Rorty’s pragmatism. The will to truth disappears, and is replaced by a desire for more or less satisfactory ...”

“... To write well about William Blake you need to be enthusiastic, aphoristic and contrary. It also helps to be slightly mad. You need to begin your book with a paragraph like this: When Blake spoke the first word of the 19th century there was no one to hear it, and now that his message, the message of emancipation from reality through the ‘shaping spirit of imagination’, has penetrated the world, and is slowly remaking it, few are conscious of the first utterer, in modern times, of the message with which all are familiar ...”

“... where it has not been evasive. While the Dutch, in whose annals the annexation of Britain by William of Orange is a less momentous occurrence, have been celebrating it without inhibition, the response of the Mother of Parliaments was to provide a poky exhibition in the Banqueting House which was taken off before the anniversary of ...”

“... Around​ 1800 William Macpherson, the 16-year-old son and heir to the chief of Clan Macpherson, decided to try his hand at planting in the West Indies. The family had been Jacobites and urgently needed to repair their finances. His father, Allan, had failed to make a fortune in the East Indies and William knew he had to make good ...”

“... English Channel – Philip II’s failed Armada of 1588 – and ends a century later with another: William of Orange’s invasion flotilla, which brought about the ‘Glorious Revolution’. Both 1588 and 1688 were moments of intense insecurity and both were presaged by the spilling of Stuart blood: the shocking execution of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587 and ...”

“... she met Yeats, was part of the spirit of the age. In 1891, the year before George’s birth, Alice James confided to her diary: ‘I suppose the thing “medium” has done more to degrade spiritual conception than the grossest form of materialism or idolatry: was there ever anything transmitted but the pettiest, meanest, coarsest facts and details: anything ...”

“... than obvious. On one CD-pilfering excursion, for instance, Mark Rothko discreetly stuffs a copy of James Taylor’s Greatest Hits into his pocket, having heard his father listening to it earlier. Mark Rothko acquired his nickname following a school trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, during which he pushed a fellow pupil into a painting. And though he now ...”

“... by BP, formerly the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, for the Franco-Persian agreement did not stop William Knox D’Arcy from undertaking a different kind of exploration. There is a lot of history and politics in this exhibition, and not all of it is ancient.The original Xerxes remains where he has been for 2500 years, in Persepolis, a part of the great ...”

“... though it plainly limited monarchy in ways intended to prevent future monarchs from acting as James II had done, was certainly not made by enemies of monarchy. Monarchy was thought of as indispensable: without a monarch there would be either anarchy or a dictator, such as Cromwell. Nor was the monarch meant to be a figurehead. It was his job to ...”

“... long history indeed – more than a thousand years of continuous existence, so far. This, writes James Campbell, is the defining contrast between England and the other great European states. Despite some redrawing of county boundaries in 1974, most of the administrative geography of England remains today much as it was in the tenth and 11th centuries. No ...”

“... in British self-consciousness after the war. Soon after the test, the Daily Graphic apostrophised William Penney, the project’s leader: ‘Britain and the Commonwealth owe a debt – almost impossible to repay – to you ... the fact that you and your team have made it possible for Britain to make and store atom bombs has made the country a world power once ...”

“... Soon afterwards, a John Buchan Society was founded at Edinburgh. In the early Eighties, my father William Buchan felt emboldened to publish a memoir of his father. Though a little defensive, it drew in the Victorian background and introduced a powerful sense of John Buchan’s strangeness and otherworldliness that had been missing from the ...”

“... along the coast. Only two weeks after Edward’s Canterbury lance-fest the archbishop of York, William Zouche, wrote to his priests: ‘There can be no one who does not know, since it is now public knowledge, how great a mortality, pestilence and infection of the air are now threatening various parts of the world, and especially England.’Did Edward and ...”

“... Published in eight volumes between 1763 and 1783, her History of England from the Accession of James I to the Revolution was massive in scale and the dominant occupation of her adult life; a sequel, The History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time, published in 1778, was written in a more relaxed conversational style as a series of ...”

“... bypass round Locke. It concentrated instead on a set of debates among such obscure antiquaries as William Petyt, James Tyrrell, William Atwood and Robert Brady. Late 17th-century Englishmen, it transpired, were less concerned with a hypothesised original contract between monarch and ...”