“... he quotes a letter from Johnson in 1743: the subject was a proposed Parliamentary history which Edward Cave and Johnson had mooted. This paragraph then follows regarding ‘our Historical Design’: I think the insertion of the exact dates of the most important events in the margin or of so many events as may enable the reader to regulate the order of ...”

“... habit of practical philanthropy which was both a virtue and an indulgence for someone who found Edward Carpenter’s ‘ideal of comradeship among simple honest ordinary lives’ so attractive. He left Cambridge and began to lecture and teach. He was inspired, as Crawford puts it, by ‘a mixture of angry youthful idealism and of upper-class notions of duty ...”

“... this seems to have been true from the moment Richie set foot in Japan. ‘In Okinawa,’ he later said, ‘I felt my testicles descend to the earth.’ The received view of Japan is of a rather prissy, buttoned-up place, but Richie found the erotic all around him: in the ‘studied expressionless faces and blank dark eyes’ of the bugaku dancers, and the ...”

“... For a Russian soldier, the Caucasus was the warm, southern equivalent of Scott’s Highlands: an Edward Waverley from Moscow or St Petersburg might expect adventure, romance, intrigue, death. The mountains of the region were fabled (Noah’s ark was supposed to have passed through the twin peaks of Mount Elborus). Beyond the natural border of the River Terek ...”

“... with a population a twentieth that of China. As the chief military historian of the campaign, Edward O’Dowd, has noted, ‘in the Korean War a similar-sized PLA force had moved further in 24 hours against a larger defending force than it moved in two weeks against fewer Vietnamese.’ So disastrous was the Chinese performance that all Deng’s wartime ...”

“... getting hold of it in sufficient quantities. A Swiss company, Sandoz, held the patent, and was said to be sitting on a stockpile of ten kilograms, a ‘fantastically large amount’. In an attempt to corner the world’s supply of the drug, Dulles signed off on the $240,000 it would cost to buy everything Sandoz had, and sent two of his officers to ...”

“... fitted into a single safe in the departmental secretary’s office. So little had survived, it was said, because most of the early records had been burnt early in the Second World War, in case they fell into the hands of German invaders. It turns out that many other old files had been stored in the basement. I don’t know whether any were burnt but if they ...”

“... been divided between the Club and the Mob,’ one veteran columnist, channelling de Tocqueville, said … ‘I’m afraid I’m on the side of the Club.’If a column was about economics, culture or science, you could have ‘quite a reasonable discussion. If it was about feminism, or Israel/Palestine or Islam or immigration, then the threads could soon turn ...”

“... was three) and buying a Ford Cortina (last produced in 1982). Speaking of strikes in the 1970s, he said: ‘All of us have memories of mass meetings, Red Robbo and the will of the membership being entirely overlooked by terrible abuse of procedure.’ I haven’t checked the archive footage of the meetings chaired by the British Leyland trade union convenor ...”

“... aspirations. In Egypt in the same year as Amritsar, disorder was put down by General Sir Edward Bulfin with ‘such a display of force as would bring conviction that conflict with the Government was hopeless’. Floggings, shootings, hangings and the burning of houses and livestock, as a result of which 1500 people died, achieved the desired ...”

“... himself – by the American Medical Bureau to Save Spanish Democracy. The AMB was the creation of Edward Barsky, a young East Coast doctor whose father had founded the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston in 1916. Barsky was already a member of the Communist Party when he began raising money for medical equipment and calling on US doctors and nurses to serve in ...”

“... lifetime. According to Hugo Young, Thatcher had to be talked into Right to Buy by a desperate Edward Heath, then her leader, who’d been persuaded by his friend Pierre Trudeau after his electoral defeat in February 1974 that he needed a fistful of populist policies. No wonder Thatcher baulked. Right to Buy violated basic Thatcherite values: that ...”

“... candidates. ‘Once she opened her mouth, the rest of us began to look rather second-rate,’ he said, then added: ‘Her knowledge and eloquence were a source of some irritation to her fellow candidates.’ You feel this says as much about them as it does about her. She certainly chose the right party. As Moore remarks, she was neither witty nor an original ...”