“... 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 ...”

“... an extra 3d for Poets’ Corner and the nave, and an extra shilling for the royal tombs and north transept. These days it’ll cost you £25, plus another £4.50 for the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Galleries (worth it, in my opinion, for the effigy of Nelson and another from 1686 of Charles II in one of his own outfits). This makes it, by my ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... one not exactly as Taylor himself liked to tell it. True, he was the product of an irreproachable North Country tradition of dissent, as much political as religious – ‘a hereditary Lancashire radical’ was how he fairly described himself in the Fifties. His self-image as an embattled outsider, railing against alien privilege, was not false but it was ...”

“... sitting down occasionally by the wayside to dip into it.’ My great-grandfather soon discovered Oliver Goldsmith and Thomas De Quincey. ‘The beauty of the prose poems and neatness of the humour was such as I had never before met with.’ The practical mysteries of propagation and grafting now cohabited with another less focused compulsion, the urge to ...”