“... made news as well as money. No one asked A.J.P. Who? Such tensions are worth exploring; and the more A.J.P. Taylor’s life is explored, the more tensions are disclosed. When he wrote his autobiography, he proposed to call it ‘An Uninteresting Story’, doubtless suspecting that his publishers would veto this proposal ...”

“... superiority that commands prestige, and abilities of which society cannot sanely deprive itself.Thomas Piketty quotes Boutmy’s proposition in Capital in the 21st Century (2013), the bestseller that made him a household name among today’s intellectual and business elite. According to Piketty – and it is hard to disagree – this ‘incredible ...”

“... time as editor, he turned out copy to order, gave the paper a new and daring editorial direction (more news, more sensation), drove up circulation at the expense of the Kendal Chronicle and delivered a profit. De Quincey’s hesitancy in launching himself as a writer is puzzling. It was as though the glamour he had vested ...”

“... her origins in four novels, each a differently disguised autobiography and family history, and one more straightforward memoir. To read these books is to enter a strange space of lenticular shimmer, partly because of all the glamour: Berlin, Rome, Paris, New York, where Bedford sat out war in Europe in the 1940s, and especially Sanary-sur-Mer, on the ...”

“... become well known too, and perhaps it has lodged in people’s memories because it is something more than merely droll: it is rather sad. Under what circumstances might a wedding cake be left out in the rain? Something farcical but catastrophic must have happened, the marquee collapsing or the bride absconding – just the sort of ominous, unexplained ...”

“... ages is, he suggests, a gross oversimplification, and in its place he seeks to provide a richer, more nuanced analysis, albeit one drawn almost exclusively from printed sources and from such secondary accounts of limited portions of this territory as we already possess. On the whole he succeeds admirably, and the vigour of his prose, his skills at synthesis ...”

“... these islands, but which sometimes exerted an influence on British diplomacy and high culture. Far more complicating – because it went on for much longer and all social levels were ultimately involved – was the impact of runaway formal and informal empire. By the 1820s, a fifth or more of the world’s population, in ...”

“... required’. For his son, public school, at Sherborne, was followed by four years reading, or more often not reading, classics at Oxford from 1923 to 1927. Friendships formed at Oxford in the 1920s seem so pervasive in the literary life of interwar Britain that we may be in danger of forgetting how small the actual numbers were: Day-Lewis was one of just ...”

“... summer), but its founder remains an elusive figure: the Bond villain of the modern Scottish scene. More than a garden, Little Sparta was intended as a martial state – Finlay designed stamps for it, and a flag – and with a machine gun emblazoned on its entrance it did not seem overly keen to welcome visitors. When a Strathclyde Regional Council sheriff ...”

“... must energetically gear himself up to the marital state. His bride would expect him to present a more sociable face to a wider world, to act at ease in mixed company, and to improve everything from his manners to his taste to fit her aspirations. In all likelihood, this would involve a new house, the marital home, or at least a decorative clean ...”

“... possible for him to play the injured party in public.His resignation speech as prime minister – more accurately, a speech promising to stay on as caretaker until the Tory Party elects his successor, a process which could stretch to the end of summer – came after two days during which his administration collapsed around him (there were 62 resignations in ...”

“... policies, Adam Smith would have recoiled. The social policy he sought to develop was more civilised than anything on offer today from the Howards and the Heseltines, the Portillos and the Lilleys. To be fair to them, most of the Peterhouse School have chosen to expose skeletons in liberal or left-wing cupboards rather than attempt to exhume a ...”

“... dismissed as classics and … largely unread due to the effort involved in reading and turning any more than two hundred pages’. The context of this passage is a harebrained scheme to freeze sound by the Frigicom process, using liquid nitrogen, so that noise pollution can be frozen at source and disposed of safely at sea. These books have safely been turned ...”

“... sterility’ (though he at least had the hardihood to go and see them for himself); in 1826 Noel Thomas Carrington accused them of ‘shaming the map of England’ with their barrenness. Such was the outsider’s or townsperson’s notion of the moors, expanded to a visionary plane by Shakespeare in Macbeth and King Lear. The weather on the heath ...”

“... then than it would now. The enterprise on which Liddell and Scott had embarked was perhaps more central to Victorian high culture (the culture that produced Jowett, Matthew Arnold and Housman) than the Oxford English Dictionary itself. There was humour in Liddell and Scott, or so we were told, but it was donnish to the point of desiccation. The entry ...”