“... no memory of my father, who was a local historian, talking or writing about it. The landscape of north Wexford, where I was born, is dotted with memorials to 1798, but there is nothing, as far as I know, at Scullabogue. Its memory was erased from what a child could learn about 1798. It was a complication in our glorious past, and it was essential for our ...”

“... local electoral convenience – Mrs Thatcher instinctively warms to the Jewish nouveaux riches of North London and seems to see Judaism as an exemplary religion of capitalism. The Chief Rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovits, has done much to encourage this symbiosis: indeed, he seems to have the ambition, as Young puts it, of becoming ‘the spiritual leader of ...”

“... the crown; as a result partisanship carried different inflections north of the border. The experience of Ireland was more violent still and even further removed from the English template. Civil war on the magnitude Ireland witnessed between 1689 and 1691 could not be squeezed into a pint-pot labelled ...”

“... of children by Ibn Rushd, and their descendants disperse all over the world, but particularly to North America, where the story resumes in the present shortly after a devastating storm, caused by jinn reopening the ‘wormholes’ between Fairyland and the human world, has hit New York. The wormholes had been sealed for more than eight hundred years and with ...”

“... Roger Scrutons and it is not easy to reconcile them: barrister, aesthetician, champion of Senator Joseph McCarthy, teacher at Birkbeck College (an institution with a tradition of proletarian outreach), editor of the ultra-Tory Salisbury Review foxhunter. And novelist. Fortnight’s Anger (1981) was hard-going – a murky tale of adolescent sexuality full of ...”

“... Barney, which Wheatcroft doesn’t mention, occurred in his heyday. He bought a Millais called Joseph and the Sheep which he hung with due prominence in his Park Lane house. At a reception Barney was loudly asked by an aristocratic society grande dame (presumably to effect some social discomfiture) why he had bought the picture and what was it that made it ...”

“... who also had vast coal-mining interests, and aspired to the political domination of the entire North-West. They had been running Westmorland like a giant pocket borough since the heyday of Sir James (‘Wicked Jimmy’) Lowther, 1st earl of Lonsdale: a man Thomas De Quincey called ‘a true Feudal Chieftain’, notorious for his ‘gloomy temper and habits ...”

“... of Volume One. To mark the difference of tone, or perhaps out of mere incompetence, Michael Joseph have arranged matters so that the two volumes don’t match, whether in dust jackets or out of them: clashing cloths, misaligned lettering, ill-assorted portraits. Only face up and side by side do they make a pair, as though the publisher couldn’t ...”

“... In allowing Catholic clerics as well as prominent laymen to draw up and, under the auspices of Joseph Breen, administer the 1930 Motion Picture Production Code, Hays helped create what the historian Francis Couvares described as ‘an industry largely financed by Protestant bankers, operated by Jewish studio executives and policed by Catholic ...”

“... voting than social class or level of education, and a much better indicator than living in the North of England. The best indicator of all (according to the British Election Study) was support for the restoration of the death penalty. Similarly, the vast majority of Trump voters were traditional Republicans in traditional Republican areas. In the ...”

“... As they themselves suggested, and he had talked to them, they had migrated overland from the north, from Asia, over what we now call the Bering Strait, and whereas some, like the Mexica, had long since settled in cities and so become civilised, others, like the Chichimeca, had only recently stopped moving, and so were still simple. Differences in ...”

“... out to be McCarthy’s last crusade; in a formal and spectacular sense, his career ended when Joseph Welch, a Boston lawyer and counsel for the army, replied to the ascription of Communist connections to a young lawyer on his staff: ‘Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.’ McCarthyism had been ...”

“... the visitor. Lockwood petitions meekly for a cup of tea. Then things start to move quickly. Joseph, the servant, conducts him to an upstairs room, where he’s soon fast asleep, primed for nightmare. We never do find out what happened to the cup of tea. Before long, Heathcliff, shaken out of an uneasy rest by Lockwood’s terror, has attempted to hurl ...”

“... who discovered the beavers on an expedition canoeing through Canada in a vain attempt to find a north-west passage to China. A great pleasure of the book lies in the several stories like this that Brook tells. Here is a passage describing Champlain facing down some Mohawk warriors: There had been four lead balls in the chamber of Champlain’s arquebus. At ...”

“... appear as many multi­colour­ed shorelines woven into an undul­ating whole. A key floats in the North Sea (mark­ed here as ‘The German Ocean’), east of the Humber, displaying a cross-section of strata. Smith’s Strata Identified by Organised Fossils (1816) introduced his principle of faunal succession, which posits that the fossil types present in ...”