“... to use the attacks as an excuse to tighten even further its rules on immigration and asylum. Some hope is all I can say. Given how hard people have had to work to stop Charles Clarke’s Home Office sending asylum seekers they claim aren’t genuine back to Zimbabwe, of all places, that Blunkettised arm of government may ...”

“... are other contenders for the title, including Henry VIII, Good Queen Bess (the pirates’ patron), Charles I and, not least, Oliver Cromwell. The war in question is known to us as the War of Jenkins’s Ear, thus dubbed by Thomas Carlyle a century later. The extraordinary thing is that it was more than eight years since Captain Robert Jenkins of the brig ...”

“... stand. Their nation, of whose actuality they seem to possess only the frailest knowledge: Prince Charles, already well into middle age, was surprised to learn from a bibliomane that Charing Cross Road had once been the centre of the London book trade. He is constantly bemused by farmers using pesticides.What they do feel they know is that their subjects ...”

“... and it’s good enough for you.’ But with the research organised by such bodies as the Institut Charles-de-Gaulle and the Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent bringing together those who knew and who worked with the General and historians with an interest in establishing their own analyses and narratives, we are able to proceed to new assessments both of ...”

“... the next one after that. And if the present queen had decided to call it a day at 70, then King Charles III and his mistress would by now already be installed in Buckingham Palace. It is impossible to know whether the British monarchy would have survived developments such as these. But it probably would have done: few sovereigns in modern history have lost ...”

“... and blamed their failures on the dead weight of resistance at all levels of society. John Cook, Charles I’s prosecutor, said that ‘we would have enfranchised the people, if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom.’ William Sedgwick told the generals that ‘not one of a hundred will own what you set down as the public interest ...”

“... narrators ‘have a DISSECTIVE property in common, which is essentially not theirs but yours’. Charles Lever’s A Day’s Ride, on the other hand, was a disaster, and Dickens had to move in smartly with Great Expectations. His sensitive negotiations with Lever and with other novelists such as Charles Reade and Bulwer ...”

“... that all men might see that she was with child’. What was it these men saw? It was reported to Charles V that his daughter-in-law was exhibiting the ‘customary symptoms’ of pregnancy: her colouring, ‘the state of her breasts’, the fact that her dresses no longer did up. She was expected to give birth in May 1555; a nursery was prepared and a cradle ...”

“... king were taking on God. Ann Fanshawe, the daughter of a royalist MP, who was 17 when she fled to Charles I’s wartime headquarters in Oxford, likened herself to a fish out of water. The conflict between king and Parliament was supposed to end with one big battle at Edgehill on 23 October 1642. But it lasted four years. And even after ...”

“... nun.’ Later on, her two mentors were the ponderous and pedantic philosopher Herbert Spencer and Charles Booth the social investigator and a live wire who introduced her to the world of politics and philanthropy. But to neither could she give her heart. ‘I must pour my poor crooked thoughts into somebody’s heart,’ she wrote, aged 15, at the beginning ...”

“... a law to make contraceptives available for the first time in Ireland, the then minister for health Charles Haughey described it as ‘an Irish solution to an Irish problem’. Permitting women to travel abroad for abortion is another such solution: keep the issue out of sight and out of mind. The abortion rate in Ireland will not fall if the referendum ...”

“... sodomy. On such occasions it was customary for the condemned to confess his guilt, if only in the hope of persuading the authorities to take pity on his widow and children, for the property of a felon belonged to the Crown. Indeed, had Castlehaven been willing in the days before his execution to beg for mercy he would quite likely have been pardoned. But he ...”

“... write another ‘film-book’. There have been a lot of good ones published since the war, but I hope to do better than that. It will, I hope, be the story of a young man of the 20th century and his Muse, his dazzling, dancing, fascinating mistress. I owe it to my cock-teasing mistress to get it all down. Much that is ...”

“... The 20th century,’ Charles Sabel remarks in his essay in the collection in honour of Albert Hirschman, ‘has been a gigantic lesson in the transformability of theories, political programmes and institutions through their recombination in new contexts.’ It is a revealing remark. For although most of what now goes on in the ‘advanced’ societies – in what since the Bandung Conference of 1955 have sometimes been thought of as the First and Second Worlds – has indeed turned out to be very different from what was once expected; and although there is now also an even more varied Third World; that’s to say, although almost everything, event and context, has confounded expectation and will no doubt continue to do so – nevertheless the theories we have with which to understand, expect and direct it all are increasingly antique ...”

“... If Bill Rodgers, a privy councillor for thirty years, didn’t have the answers, what hope is there for the rest of us? What is this council, who are its members and what on earth does it do? The members include all present and past members of the cabinet, most living speakers and chief whips of parliament, a few members of the royal family, some ...”