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“... of 16 when the Revolution broke out. Like many aristocrats, he hoped he might loyally serve his king under a liberal constitution, but this became increasingly impossible, and after his marriage to a granddaughter of Malesherbes he found himself swept up in the brutalities of the Terror. Many of his wife’s family and Malesherbes himself were executed, and ...”

“... the United States began a shift from the republic of inclusion shaped by Lincoln, Carnegie, and King to the republic of exclusion prophesied by Cotton Mather, John D. Rockefeller and George Lincoln Rockwell. The mask was accepted by Dylan, but worn more lightly. In ‘Lo and Behold!’ it floats just in front of the ...”

“... wife’. As a Parliamentary candidate her least fashionable constituency was to be Birmingham King’s Norton, which she nursed for seven difficult years. The two elections which she fought, unsuccessfully, were at Cheltenham and ever-congenial Oxford. In the main her life was cast in pleasant places, as she would be the first to admit. The circuit of ...”

“... because of their substantial remittances by no means uninfluential characters. They were loyal to king and country, and pined to be like father. Thus they damped down tendencies towards independence, encouraged complacency (and contributed to an officer cadre that would willingly follow orders at places singled out for the slaughter of colonials such as ...”

“... thinks the same way. These may be provincial views but they are not necessarily mistaken. Pope John Paul evidently does not think they are. His journey to Central America was that of an enraged (and conceivably ill-advised) chief constable come to impose order on an unruly populace and on his own badly-disciplined rank and file. The plaza where the Pope ...”

“... no higher tribute to the late Prince Consort than by dedicating the first several Idylls of the King to his memory as ‘Scarce other than my king’s ideal knight’. Between them, the two Tennysons illustrated two major aspects of the chivalric obsession. Fancy expanded into pretentiousness which then lapsed into ...”

“... downwards.’ The profound patriotism of Shelley and Byron, the inability to think logically of John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman and Lewis Carroll? No, it won’t do, and Orwell, for once, was talking through his hat – perhaps relaxing in what he considered an ‘English’ manner. It really seems, then, not quite proper that distinguished experts ...”

“... Sestier resides. Le Roy Ladurie, in his explication de texte, compares Sestier in Langlade to the King who lives in the almost equally distant Paris, whence, as the dictons of the region tell us, ‘neither good wind nor good people ever came’. Nothing good could be expected from Nîmes either, that Babylon of Protestantism, or from the Huguentos who fill ...”

“... have an integrity and persistence of their own. Academic historians such as Maurice Cowling and John Vincent have for years been plotting the political seduction of the aspiring middle classes into primrose leagues. It was all in Bagehot anyway. Similarly it is striking, but in some ways rather pathetic, to discover a Marxist such as Philip Corrigan ...”

“... and they do keep cropping up. I think there’s more than a little Pynchon floating around John Kennedy Toole, whose A Confederacy of Dunces is a book nearly as bloated as its protagonist; Don DeLillo’s social, um, satires owe more than a little to Pynchon’s work; and in a recent essay in Harper’s magazine the young novelist Jonathan Franzen ...”

“... force, and, as modern translations make clearer (the Revised Standard Version translates the King James Bible’s ‘time should be no longer’ as ‘there should be no more delay’), it is only when the seventh trumpet sounds that ‘the mystery of God’ will be finished. But Kant, encouraged perhaps by Luther’s translation, was unable to wait. In ...”

“... could do all these things, with operations stretching around the globe.In the late 19th century John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil had a monopoly on oil refineries, pipelines, rail transport and storage facilities in the US, but it didn’t control US oilfields, and – to start with – depended on British oil traders to ship its products to Europe. In ...”

“... he disliked anti-slavery far more. In 1859 he led the detachment of US Marines that captured John Brown, following the failed raid on Harpers Ferry. But Lee considered Brown marginal, even ridiculous; as Guelzo shows, it was the emergence of the anti-slavery Republican Party that politicised him. On Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, seven Southern ...”

“... Browne and Congreve as well as such less remembered figures as the sea captain Robert Knox, and John Chilton, who, Macdonald speculates, was ‘probably’ the author of Voyage to the West Indies … in the year 1560. The penalty for wearing so much learning lightly was, at this midpoint in her career, to be patronised by the more severe and humourless ...”

“... the director Alan Clarke in which a repressed Midlands schoolboy’s visions of Edward Elgar and King Penda threaten to unlock the secrets of his own sexuality. All of these productions are considered at length in The Magic Box, Rob Young’s hefty survey of occult British film and television. Young, who wrote the excellent Electric Eden (2010), a history of ...”