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“... against evils, and perhaps there is no easier business,’ Trollope said of the anti-slavery MP John Bright, a theatrical orator who couldn’t be bothered with political detail. Celebrating the Civil War as a triumph of freedom over slavery is equally easy. A few decades ago, US historians tried to complicate this heroic narrative. Guided at times by ...”

“... Essex, the most overlooked and undersold of counties, is under siege. In the north, it is menaced by the BAA, with its overweening commercial ambitions for Stansted Airport, starting with a second runway that will scythe through the undemonstrative countryside and lay waste to at least two hamlets of venerable buildings, while ensuring that the idyllic ancient deer park of Hatfield Forest – already harassed almost beyond endurance by air traffic – will be made a no-go area, with intensified noise and pollution ...”

“... First Family might constitute an offence against the ethos of the republic. Although only John F. Kennedy held the presidency, there were several attempts to restore the family to the office. JFK’s brother Robert was assassinated after his victory in the California Democratic primary in 1968. The immediate chances of a third brother, Senator Edward ...”

“... violence started up again in Northern Ireland in 1968. Several of their colleagues are from the North: the poets Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane, John Montague, Michael Longley. Deane, especially, has been important to them, arguing about Irish literature and the question of tradition, the ...”

“... also provoke a degree of puzzlement, as much on the right as on the left. In The Right Nation, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, two centre-right journalists who work on the Economist, ask why only 54 per cent of voters earning over $100,000 a year voted for Bush in 2000. Why does the party of big business, deregulation and tax-cutting engender less ...”

“... a name which he later changed for the same reasons that Marion Morrison became ‘Duke’ John Wayne and Izzy Demsky became Kirk Douglas. There was another motive. Grey’s birthplace was Zanesville in Ohio – a town founded by and named after his grandfather. Some of his early works, before he found a richer vein further west, piously celebrate the ...”

“... have brought together a formidable trio of scholars, Campbell himself, Patrick Wormald and Eric John, to carve up the Anglo-Saxon age between them. Campbell has tackled the period from c. 350 AD to c. 660; Wormald from c. 660 to c. 900; and John from c. 900 to 1066. Other experts, several archaeologists and a ...”

“... history into several ages in which different tasks were required of man, after the teaching of John Nelson Darby, a 19th-century Plymouth Brethren minister) had been of no more importance, theologically, than Tennessee snake-handling. Lindsey broadened dispensationalism’s doctrinal base and gave end-times religion mass appeal. In his sceptical ...”

“... by the 1850s, when William Russell was reporting from the Crimea for the Times and his editor, John Delane, was fulminating against the mismanagement of the war, nobody could argue with it. ‘This country is ruled by the Times,’ the Saturday Review declared. ‘We all know it, or if we do not know it, we ought to know it.’ Once, governments had ...”

“... came from comfortable middle-class backgrounds. Others came with nothing from nowhere. John Sowerby, a London merchant who died in 1823 worth half a million, had reputedly been a Cumberland farm labourer. Thomas Leyland, a merchant and banker of Liverpool, began life as a cooper and died in 1827 leaving £800,000. Sir Edward Banks, a public works ...”

“... Harnforth? Mr Tim Harnforth?’ One and Last Love is Mr Tim Harnforth’s novel as well as Mr John Braine’s. An authorial confidence informs us that it was originally conceived with more melodramatic action to it. The hero was to find himself stricken with a terminal disease and be forced to a climax of love and death. But instead, the novelist was ...”

“... to commit suicide, but the coroner decided it was an accident. While the premature deaths of, say, John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath seemed somehow implicit in the trajectory of their careers, there was nothing remotely maudit about Jarrell, until the last couple of years of his life, when the approach of his 50th birthday induced a bout of ...”

“... James Waddell and others. Equally, as members of the Labour Delegation to the European Parliament, John Prescott and I were ‘educated in the ways of Upper Whitehall’ by Sir Thomas Brimelow, the former PUS at the Foreign Office, who became a Labour Peer and a British representative at Strasbourg. But it is no surprise to me that in over twenty years as an ...”

“... 30-foot dining-table. Lady Astor did not have a good press in my family. My father had served in North Africa and Italy with the Eighth Army, which Nancy had asserted in the House of Commons in 1944 was ‘dodging D-Day’. They returned singing to the tune of ‘Lili Marlene’: We’re the D-Day Dodgers, out in Italy, Always on the vino, always on the ...”

“... When​ the Earl of Bute resigned as prime minister in April 1763 it looked as if the North Briton, a paper whose vituperative attacks had dogged his administration, had achieved its ambition and would now cease publication. But a week later George III opened the new Parliament with a speech from the throne which, by its support for the peace terms being negotiated with France, reignited the wrath of the North Briton’s flamboyant co-editor John Wilkes and his backers in the City, prompting the publication of another withering issue, number 45 ...”