“... political lineage of Europe, that of ‘Dr Johnson, Pitt the Younger, Burke, Benjamin Disraeli and Lord Salisbury’. Some other recent world-histories have taken a stand against Euro-centrism, notably William McNeill’s A World History (1971) and J.M. Roberts’s The Hutchinson History of the World (1976). In this regard, Mr Thomas is a self-conscious ...”

“... Presidents of Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia met in an emergency summit to discuss Sir Alec Douglas Home’s announcement in July 1970 that Britain would sell arms to South Africa. Mr Smith was invited to join the Presidents’ meeting and he brings out well the unbridgeable chasm of mistrust which opened between Britain and Obote and Nyerere. Unlike most ...”

“... poetry which Protestantism inhibited. But he also mocks Christian sado-masochism: the crucified Lord wears a ‘wreath of rakish thorn’. Religion emerges from the sequence as a supreme fiction rather than as something unequivocally affirmed. The Arnoldian claim that literature may take the place of religion becomes anything but consoling if the Christian ...”

“... in The Great Gatsby, of needing to fulfil a personal myth and become the man he had dreamed of. Lord Jim and Gatsby are doomed by the plot they invent for themselves: Crane’s own tale was ironically haunted by just the kind of démarche or incongruous detail he was good at describing. The debonair poker-playing war reporter was in fact a mother’s ...”

“... from Iceland, which first appeared in 1937. Very funny in places, and Auden’s verse ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ is a triumph, though not in the same league as the great man himself; surprisingly, Auden uses a seven-line stanza instead of the eight of Don Juan. Auden and MacNeice’s ‘Last Will and Testament’ which ends the book contains the ...”

“... Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle, in 1635, to tell him ‘once for all, that though I honour you as my lord, yet my love to you is just of the same nature that it is to Mr Payne, bred out of private talk, without respect to your purse,’ or, one might add, to his rank. In 1668, Hobbes was asked his opinion of Martha Taylor, a victim of what we would now call ...”

“... that some trainee heritage pirate had tried to chisel free of its moorings. Then got the hell out. Home. Past the squatted shell of the Black Bull with its ‘No Evictions’ banner, through the Blank Generation extras waiting for nothing in the boarded-up shopping precinct, ducking into Muggers’ Alley alongside the decommissioned post office. To my ...”

“... ideas to produce ever more powerful explanations and predictions of physical phenomena – indeed, Lord Rayleigh, addressing the British Association in 1900, felt the need to apologise for the fact that physics was nearly finished. Five years later, Einstein and Planck launched a revolution that would overthrow Newtonianism. Couldn’t the same fate befall ...”

“... as the ‘father of his people’; on Victoria’s death it was noted that ‘mother’s come home’; and George V was known as ‘Grandpapa England’. And from there it was but a step to seeing the whole of the British Empire as a great global family, with the monarch at its head – a monarch who, from the Thirties, made this sense of family and of ...”

“... between social standing and technical skill, the gentlemen and the tarpaulins, in which even Lord Howard could lay a gun, and spoke freely and by name to his ‘poor toiling and continual labouring mariner[s]’; while Drake, in a famous scene which Rodger does his best to run down, not only said, ‘I must have the gentleman to haul and draw with the ...”

“... on the farm and playing cricca in the tavern. But in the evening, he told Vettori,I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable court of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I ...”

“... and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to see realised. But, my lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.’ What has more recently become known is that Fischer was opposed to the inclusion of the final sentence, fearing that the judge would take it as a challenge. In the event Mandela’s instinct ...”

“... separation in death was the story of her life, as for so many military wives: she has stayed at home in the Wye Valley, entombed at Marshal’s pious foundation of Tintern Abbey. The most important of these firsts was a book, without which Thomas Asbridge would struggle to sustain his sprightly narrative: the History of William Marshal is the first life ...”

“... bankers or lawyers or psychiatrists don’t have? In what sense is writing a profession? Birkin, Lord Jim, Lewis’s Tarr are all men of uncertain worldly status. (One of the characters asks of Tarr: ‘What sort of prizes could he expect to win by his professional talents? Would this notable arriviste be satisfied?’) They are the kind of people, one might ...”

“... in the United States. There the incautious motorist risked having an advertisement inserted in his home-town newspaper informing ‘whom it may concern’ that Mr X. Y. had been requested to leave his hotel in such-and-such a town for entertaining in his room a lady not his wife (for more about this collusive racket made possible under the Mann Act, which was ...”