“... the largest, to their feudal landlord. Most peasants were enserfed – that is, bound to the lord in the place where they were born – and paid taxes in kind, in the form of compulsory labour in the lord’s fields, with the family having to surrender their best beast to their ...”

“... how the system works. Some aspects of the streets around the Acropolis were reminiscent of home, of Hackney: our Olympic makeover. There were newly pedestrianised walkways, planted and primped, in place of the chaos of buses, honking taxis, competitive guides I remembered from holidays in the 1950s. Thickets of incontinent graffiti rivalled Hoxton and ...”

“... Judge, I saw him rove    Dispensing good. Burns is referring to Barskimming, seat of the judge Lord Glenlee, as he finally became. At different times this estate extracted the word ‘romantic’ or ‘romance’ from a group of people, a remarkable chorus, club or consensus composed of Robert Burns, David Hume and Henry Cockburn, while the nearby estate ...”

“... Accounts vary as to how he gained the nickname El Cid, from sidi, the Arabic honorific ‘my lord’. It is often traced to his conquered Muslim subjects in Valencia, who, the story goes, welcomed him. Yet at the time others too were called ‘mio Cid’, as the Arabic loan word served as a fairly common epithet for Castilian nobles. Another, now ...”

“... do with Clough these difficulties are compounded by two calamitous fires. The first destroyed his home Plas Brondanw and all his records in the study/studio and attics there. The second, gutting the main hotel building at Portmeirion, destroyed an archive assembled over two years by Amabel and myself with a view to a memorial exhibition in 1981. Clough had ...”

“... story another narrative may awaken and begin to stand up. And that will be the story you take home: the unending story of the story itself. You’d do well to snap your pencil and walk away at that point. Exhaustion can be a wise counsellor. But sometimes the second story not only stands up but takes to running: it comes after you, and even in your sleep ...”

“... he produced was a ‘letter to posterity’ – it was buried in the grounds of his Hampshire home – to mark the wedding of the young Princess Elizabeth. In this, he told future generations how the seeds of social destruction were being sown in his own time by the mass media and the spread of ‘the false, pernicious doctrine that “all men are ...”

“... languages and laws, were not always accorded the respect that their existence reflected on their lord. Rival allegiances were always a problem, and conquest could easily be followed by outright political oppression. Difference from the political elite could very easily be interpreted as inferiority: when habits of dress as well as language or law marked a ...”

“... values and methods developed in the more authoritarian environments of Britain’s colonies coming home to roost. (A high proportion of British secret service personnel had imperial backgrounds.) That such activity was reviled in mainland Britain may, perversely, have aided its development; if it had been more generally accepted it could have been monitored ...”

“... agony, and after eight terrible minutes, Mandrin was mercifully strangled. His career as a crime lord had lasted scarcely a year, but his legend would continue to grow for decades, as ballads, poems, plays and novels about the charismatic smuggler proliferated. The philosophers of the Enlightenment would discuss his case, and some of them would seize on it ...”

“... partisan reporting of the siege of East Aleppo presented it as a battle between good and evil: The Lord of the Rings, with Assad and Putin as Saruman and Sauron. By essentially handing over control of the news agenda to local militants, news organisations unwittingly gave them an incentive to eliminate – through intimidation, abduction and killing – any ...”

“... political climate. The early 1980s, like today, were a bad time to ask the government for money. Lord Hailsham had described the social sciences as ‘a happy hunting ground for the bogus and the meretricious’. It was, as Pearson says, a belief widely held in Tory circles: the social sciences, they felt, lacked rigour as a discipline, producing results ...”

“... the late Georgian politician and socialite, were followed by a life of Monckton-Milnes’s son, Lord Crewe. The latter was the quid pro quo for access to the archives and was, Pope-Hennessy admitted, ‘less than inspired’. Its appearance in 1955, however, started a train of thought in the mind of Crewe’s daughter Lady Cynthia Colville, who had been a ...”

“... to Jewish immigration.If Hecht​ and his Revisionist friends were to find the rescued Jews a home in Palestine, it would be against the wishes of the Arab majority and what Hecht called ‘the sly British’, who were desperately trying to maintain order. In February 1944, the Irgun declared that it was at war with the British; a still more militant ...”

“... him once a fortnight in term for an hour’s discussion on the problem I was dealing with – the home front in the Second World War. It was like being spirited away in a time-machine. To say that he brought the past to life would be true but quite inadequate. What he conveyed was the sense that the past was an unexplored country in which the traveller was ...”