“... of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and myriad small islands off their coasts. The late John Roberts, himself a pioneering exponent of world history, acknowledged some of these complexities in his editorial preface to the New Oxford History of England, the even more multi-volume successor, still in progress, to the original and influential ...”

“... wore bowler hats and most men wore stiff collars; women did not wear trousers. London was still a major centre of manufacturing and its docks were at the heart of global trade networks. People who lived in the inner city were generally poor, and they got richer as you went further out into the green and pleasant suburbs. All of this changed over the following ...”

“... from so many provenances – English, American, French and German – that his book will be a major resource for fellow historians for a long time. He makes an important remark about the relation between his evidence and his conclusions at the outset of Education of the Senses: ‘The search for documentation, the construction of causal patterns, the ...”

“... water for practical and aesthetic effect and the rearrangement of awkward existing elements, even major ones like roads, were his established techniques for rendering the surroundings of a country house picturesque. The object of the interventions was to create an apparently natural, flowing landscape, one which, however artificially engineered, nevertheless ...”

“... were named after him and he was the recipient of mandatory encomia on official occasions. John Lewis Gaddis’s biography is a tombstone-sized tribute, based on unlimited access to its subject and his papers. Not bad for a mid-level policy planner whose most senior diplomatic postings were a brief ambassadorial appointment to Belgrade and an even ...”

“... Ian Fleming called him the ‘most formidable spy in history’; other admirers included John le Carré, Tom Clancy and General MacArthur. Owen Matthews – whose new biography of Sorge is the fifth to appear in English – is well qualified to write this book: his Ukrainian maternal grandfather was Boris Bibikov, a factory worker in Kharkov who ...”

“... the obligation of men to perform their political covenants. And it was there that the Levellers John Wildman and Maximilian Petty mounted the fundamental challenge to the constitution that would be rewarded by the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords two years later. Even the sophisticated qualifications of modern scholarship, which have dwelled on ...”

“... of the village idiot. Brecht admired Lorre’s tadpoleish looks and he was soon directing him in major roles. He starred, for example, in Mann ist Mann at the same time as he was filming M. His first substantial Brechtian role was in a controversial play written by Brecht’s protégée Marieluise Fleisser called Pioniere in Ingolstadt. The play’s main ...”

“... fighting to get back my little joke, or whatever you might call it – it is more like a sergeant-major barking out at the audience: ‘laugh.’ I was allowed this paltry little thing back, and it did make the only laugh in the show. The point of this anecdote, may I tiresomely explain, is that the whole thing had become alarmingly more serious than we had ...”

“... American colonists, ‘that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’ John Stuart Mill credited India’s free-trading British overlords with benign liberal intentions towards a people self-evidently incapable of self-rule. ‘Despotism,’ he wrote, ‘is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end ...”

“... Reformed Protestantism is often called Calvinism, after the French Reformer John Calvin, but that is a mistake; the Reformed had many and varied leaders and thinkers of significance, and one of the things that annoyed the Reformed about Lutheranism was its idolisation of the single figure of Martin Luther. There was good reason for ...”

“... was over, and therefore of little concern. Fatefully, as Gurminder Bhambra and John Holmwood show, this was also the way many non-European peoples were seen: as relics to be overhauled or replaced.The hundred-year period that began around 1870 also witnessed the birth and growth of sociology, the discipline most preoccupied with ...”

“... More particularly, he was the disciple who questioned the truth of Jesus’s resurrection. In John 20, the only gospel source for the story, he demands to see and touch the physical evidence of crucifixion – ‘Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will ...”

“... anti-Fascist. Until 1948, when Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform (a postwar Comintern), Major Thompson had been a hero in Bulgaria. The following year, at the Kostov trials, a dozen Communists were accused of colluding with British liaison officers during the war, and now with Tito, to undermine the Bulgarian state. Frank’s reputation took a dive ...”

“... seemed to me,’ Henry James wrote to the critic and campaigner for homosexual rights John Addington Symonds in 1884, ‘that the victims of a common passion should sometimes exchange a look.’ The common passion James referred to was for Italy – or was it?Here is one double-take. In Mansfield Park, published in 1814, Mary Crawford is rattling ...”