“... similar to that of many recent liberals writing in the analytical tradition, such as Brian Barry, John Rawls and Charles Larmore. These writers argue that, by their nature, conceptions of the good – theocratic, secularist, vegan, carnivorous, lesbian, polygamous, socialist, libertarian or whatever – give us insufficient reason to conclude that any one of ...”

“... by his translation of the Austrian folk tale Bambi, which carried a moist Foreword from John Galsworthy.) This was the literary bridge that carried Chambers from relative hackdom on the Daily Worker to pre-eminence at the Stalinist flagship of letters, The New Masses. Indeed it was his usefulness and ability in this department that got him ...”

“... made it necessary for him to have a pseudonym or two at his disposal, and so we find ‘Captain King’ issuing instructions to his agents and arranging assignations in seedy hotels. Masters resorts to cautious speculation when the facts can’t be ascertained, showing, for example, an impossible familiarity with his subject’s state of mind at 14. This ...”

“... reform in local government and the dictatorial treatment of local authorities by the Heseltine-King regime. Gwyneth Dunwoody, in a most constructive essay on the health services, adopts a similar line of attack. All this laborious shoring up of the post-war status quo, however, is too much for Neil Kinnock, who, almost alone, tries to strike a radical ...”

“... to honour as the play proceeded. As Dodsworth writes of the fight at the end, ‘an almost-King, an almost-reconciliation and an almost-duel naturally conspire together to produce “accidental judgments, casual slaughters”.’ The trouble is, as with some 19th-century reactions to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, reading Hamlet Closely Observed ...”

“... herself seriously by falling in love with an English under-butler, was found a husband in Colonel John Campbell, a widowed brother-in-law of Dr Login, who had been placed in charge of Duleep in India and brought him up. Login owed his entire advancement to this connection, being invited to Court and given a knighthood. Yet good middle-class Lady Login was ...”

“... development or under-development. Ged Martin and Benjamin Kline discuss emigration and identities. John MacKenzie supplies a piece on imperial art. Finally, Marshall, followed by an Australian, an African and an Indian, offer their own, inevitably different, verdicts on Empire’s legacy. Throughout, we are reminded that British power to control events was ...”

“... chief among them the subject’s hands. One hand alone may clutch the brow (Martin Luther King, 1961), support the whole skull (Cecil Beaton, 1951), point its index finger into the upper lip (Colette, 1952) or into the lower lip (Tony Hancock, 1962), or feel the forelock (Francis Bacon, 1981); two hands may flatten against both cheeks (Lily ...”

“... a city of about twenty thousand inhabitants, was ruled for most of Antonello’s adult life by King Alfonso of Aragon and his illegitimate son, Ferrante. As a consequence there were strong links with other territories connected to the Aragonese dynasty, including Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. Messina was also an important stop-off for three Venetian ...”

“... In the summer​ of 2018, Lucy Knell-Taylor, a youth worker at King’s College Hospital in Camberwell, noticed that teenagers were talking more often about guns and knives. One girl said she had seen someone pistol-whipped at a party; other stories suggested that weapons were becoming more easily available. Knell-Taylor’s workload began to rise ...”

“... they do feel they know is that their subjects – the industrially injured with callouses like king-size buboes, the salt of the earth and their pneumoconiosis, the proud forklift drivers and the loyal company of chamfering machine operators – are pleased to stand to deferential attention for hours no matter what the weather and are proud to be just ...”

“... one raid, a near miss blew a bus off course; it went through the window of Sainsbury’s on the King’s Road. ‘I was going out to see if I could do anything,’ Grisewood reported. ‘When I got to the door, David called out: “Tell them they can’t bring any of the wounded in here. This dugout is full up.” And he went on reading aloud “The Hunting ...”

“... called themselves Franci, whether or not they were French-speaking or subjects of the French king, and so those they encountered in the east called them by that name, transliterated into Greek or Arabic. Westerners relished the name’s ambiguity: in their contemporary parlance Franci had come to mean French, and Francia, France, but Franci also denoted ...”

“... Babylon, a utopian London of the future and elsewhere. It’s a shame that Spufford never read John Masefield’s Box of Delights: I think he’d have liked it; and I’d like to read what he might have to say about it. The Story of the Amulet was number one in a list of the Top Ten Children’s Books of All Time (a silly notion, but appealing ...”

“... Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth, the younger, Richard of York, was taken to St John’s Abbey in Colchester, where he worked as a bricklayer. The book is almost as extraordinary a production as the story it tells. It is garnished with the usual scholarly apparatus of notes and bibliography, and much of the time pursues apparently rational ...”