“... had the stamina to argue her opponents under the table, and because Harold Wilson let her do so. Oliver Cromwell could not forget that he embodied the hopes of a radical army, and so in the end he refused the crown. Harold Wilson could not forget that he had once embodied the hopes of people like Barbara Castle, and he let her get away with murder. When he ...”

“... months he gained an immense following, not only in the Ottoman Empire but among Jews throughout North Africa, Europe and Central Asia. He also attracted quite a few non-Jewish adherents. The Sultan, fearing that Sabbatai might be trying to usurp his power, had him arrested and incarcerated in the Dardanelles, first in the notorious Bagno prison, then in ...”

“... Among the objects of hatred and ridicule in English memory the regime of Oliver Cromwell’s Major-Generals has a towering place. The division of the country, in 1655, into 12 districts administered by killjoy Puritan commanders was a brief episode, in effect lasting less than a year, but it has been reviled and derided from that time to this ...”

“... Sam’ projected the essence of ‘jungle’ techniques. Following the example of King Oliver, they developed a wider variety of often speech-like growling and wa-wa sounds by humming and/or gargling gutturally in their throats while blowing legitimate musical notes on brass instruments that were distorted by various metal mutes and/or the manual ...”

“... allowing a glimpse of Venice across the lagoon, then retreats into the campagna. As we headed north, the hills bulked larger and darker. We got off the train at Conegliano, just north of Treviso, where we caught a bus to Tezze di Piave. I picked some straggly poppies at the roadside. Tezze is a small town, much prized ...”

“... there were important outposts in the East Midlands, and a few spots further afield: Wales, even North America. Since the Muggletonians never numbered more than a few hundred, and since 99 per cent of people of their sort did not choose to become Muggletonians, there is not much that social history can make of all this. If there are horizontal questions to ...”

“... Museum, the Museum of Anthropology in Cambridge, the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, the Great North Museum in Newcastle and the Church of England have all committed to returning their collections (or are ‘open to all possibilities’). Jesus College, Cambridge is in the process of returning a bronze cockerel. The British Museum is prevaricating behind a ...”

“... stocking Caribbean goods that he should offer credit, as is customary in the Caribbean.Henry Oliver, the man Moses is expecting, eventually arrives without cigarettes, rum or money, having gambled most of it away on the ship; he is wearing only a light suit and a pair of watchekongs to greet the ‘beast winter’. A white woman from Ladbroke Grove gives ...”

“... of class and sex. Alger Hiss was not exactly a patrician but he had been a law clerk for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes; he had been one of the bright boys of the Roosevelt New Deal and he had been energetic and instrumental in setting up two of the pillars of the postwar liberal American imperial order – the United Nations and the Carnegie Endowment for ...”

“... down to ten (about the same as Ian Fleming and better than P.G. Wodehouse). On the links at North Berwick, when he made a bad shot, he would turn away and gaze over the Forth and then turn round again, smiling. At times he sounds like a fully paid-up member of the Drones club. No one, after all, was better equipped to live a life of a sporting ...”

“... place, too: so lavishly heathered, gorsed, pined, silver-birched and golf-coursed it might be North Britain. Yet despite this bonfire of the unities it is distinct, a monument to douce fakery, indeed the monument. It’s at its best when it is all dressed up, most real when it’s at its most sham self. The architect and pamphleteer Thomas ...”

“... Oliver Dowden​ , the co-chairman of the Conservative Party, appeared twice on the Today programme late last year. First, on 15 November, he answered questions about his party’s handling of the corruption allegations against the MP Owen Paterson, and then again on 17 December, he discussed the loss of Paterson’s North Shropshire seat at the by-election necessitated by his resignation ...”

“... it comes to seem probable that the geo-political opening undertaken by William Casey, McFarlane, North and company was nothing less than an attempted coup whose goal was either the fomenting of prolonged instability in Iran or the accession to power of some person or group less hostile to the US and Israel. The man publicly identified with the arms deals in ...”

“... projecting unspecified rays from his tower at Wardenclyffe in a direction slightly west of due north, had mistaken his aim by a small but fatal angle, causing the beam to miss Peary’s base at Ellesmere Island, cross the Polar region over into Siberia, and hit the Stony Tunguska instead. Reading this passage in the spirit of Bernard Carlson’s ...”

“... and often pathetic – anecdote. (The suicide in 1978 of a former assistant librarian, Oliver Stallybrass, is, if anything, even more harrowing than that of Bryan Hunt.) Started as ‘a private subscription library to serve the needs of scholars by lending books for use at home’, the London Library opened in May 1841 in two rented rooms under the ...”