“... the Low Countries. But it includes Ireland, a lordship and, after 1541, a kingdom, subject to the king of England and legally (according to English law) ‘annexed’ to England. This was a very peculiar kingdom indeed. There was no Irish crown, no Irish coronation (with those limiting oaths and undertakings), and no English ...”

“... to overtake Spain by contrasting the conquest of Mexico by Cortés in 1519-22 and the attempt by Christopher Newport to ‘conquer’ Virginia 87 years later. In many respects these were very different kinds of venture, with very different outcomes. Cortés was, initially at least, the lieutenant of the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez; Newport was the ...”

“... on prayer and scripture, or dutifully took their pews and harrumphed about it. Archer’s parents, Christopher and Mary, were recusants, fined for their obstinacy, but this wasn’t so heinous or uncommon in Reformation England. It’s easy to imagine some friend or relative of the old faith slipping a sacred token into one of their graves.Their son ...”

“... the interpretation eloquently enshrined in the great Lutyens Memorial published in 1950, where Christopher Hussey, in his 600-page biography, and A. S. G. Butler, in his three volumes of plans, plates and commentary, acclaimed our Ned as ‘the greatest artist in building whom Britain has produced’. Lutyens’s star was already in eclipse when this ...”

“... understanding of Christianity as creed, not lineage, that had held for more than a millennium. The king and the pope both opposed the restrictions, yet they were widely adopted across Spain and then Portugal, especially after a later, Spanish pope, Alexander VI, approved blood purity statutes in 1495. By the end of the 15th century, as Francisco Bethencourt ...”

“... the Quarterly. But for the magazine’s first twenty-five years, its mainstay was John Wilson. As Christopher North, he wrote mountains of copy. Reviews, feature articles, verses, sentimental tales of peasant life, unsentimental tales of gothic horror: he churned the stuff out in heroic bouts of scribbling that tested his physical strength as much as his ...”

“... of him without a glow of patriotism ... ’ ‘What the hell has that got to do with it?’ howls Christopher Hitchens in a New Statesman philippic against Foot. Hitchens would rather examine Russell coolly, drily, as an international philosopher and political thinker. But Foot’s rich, exaggerative style does, undeniably, mirror his subject’s. Russell ...”

“... an uncle and a priest (you need to consult the notes to be quite sure that Chekhov thought Father Christopher silly), Yegorushka travels the prairies of Southern Russia, as Chekhov had lately done and as he had done before in his youth. He transfers for a while to a caravan of carters, perched on the loads. The birds and plants of the steppe are observed. A ...”

“... the Whig G.M. Trevelyan, who in 1939 published The English Revolution 1688-9, and the Marxist Christopher Hill, who responded the following year with The English Revolution 1640. To the Victorians, 1688 became a less uncomfortable subject once the hardship of the 1840s had passed. Macaulay, indeed, gave the Revolution a fresh justification and a fresh ...”

“... character is named Peepgass he will also be scrawny and ineffectual. Irony, in other words, is not king in these pages. Wolfe’s declared chief ambition is to have himself described as Dickensian, but it’s not only the names that let him down. (In The Bonfire of the Vanities an old firm is called Dunning, Sponget and Leach; in A Man in Full we encounter a ...”

“... world. Recognising that he could have IP with world-changing possibilities, Hooke went to see the King and asked him for a patent – that’s how you could secure your rights to IP in Restoration England, though it was more customary to work through Crown officials. Hooke gave the King an early version of his watch and ...”

“... left him to face the music. Both men worked closely with Carlos Cardoen, the Chilean Cluster Bomb King who has only two heroes, Pinochet and Saddam Hussein. Cardoen’s factories in Iquique kept the Iran-Iraq war going nicely, killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of young men with his specially cheap cluster bombs. These could only have been manufactured ...”

“... regard Marxist historiography as a menace. Professor J.H. Hexter’s recent ad hominem assault on Christopher Hill’s scholarly integrity seems to reveal the same crusading zeal on the other side of the Atlantic. Furthermore, in a cunning jest of History, some Marxist philosophers have latterly enlisted in the armies of the Right in denying Lebensraum to ...”

“... Christopher Ricks’s new book makes available many of his distinguished lectures given in the Eighties and Nineties. The essays retain a sense of occasion, and of a star performance on Ricks’s part, while the book has been designed with the aggressive sobriety that signals a class act. Presumably it was the author who decreed that the title, in defiance of commercial logic, should give no clue to the contents, and who dispensed with routine enticements such as a subtitle and Preface, so that there’s no short-cut to finding what the book is about ...”

“... when a Scots Guards platoon executed 24 perfectly harmless Chinese plantation workers. Instead, Christopher Hale – a journalist with long experience reporting from Germany and South-East Asia – has put together a massive history of the British presence on the Malay peninsula. He tries to explain the outbreak of the jungle guerrilla war which began in ...”