“... coupling of a general syllabus malaise with the rigour of its Medieval component – may be related. As Wormald says at the head of the first chapter: ‘The country in which this book was conceived, and the literary language in which it was written, are both more than a thousand years old.’ None of this has halted the British tendency to sell ...”

“... Hawaryat, according to the Ethiopian royal chronicle, had died a decade or so earlier, on 22 May 1760. Bredin’s overall account seems strongly influenced by Graham Hancock’s The Sign and the Seal: The Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant (1992). Hancock was the first to argue that, as a Freemason (and hence an heir of the Templars), Bruce did not ...”

“... present the geographer as the student of landscape, as the environmentalist and as the ideologist. Richard Muir looks at the landscape as nature’s stage. Ian Simmons and Michael Tooley, with their team of scientists, identify the stages of nature as they have changed through the successive periods of British prehistory. David Stoddart’s conclave of ...”

“... high to hear. It probably wouldn’t have made any difference. Unless you were listening to Cliff Richard or attending Billy Graham’s hallelujah meetings, the Sixties (not the decade, but that period from 1965 to 1972ish) were irresistible. They have been the good fortune and the curse of my generation (‘May you live ...”

“... basket cases of the Queen Anne period. It would have been impossible for Swift, however much he may have sympathised with those hapless victims of nature’s malignity and man’s exploitative instincts, to understand their feelings, let alone convey them. The growing concern for suffering humanity in the next two centuries seldom extended to freaks, who ...”

“... Expeditionary forces and the French Armies from the very first days of the First World War up to May 1917. In 1915 when the failure of ‘his’ Dardanelles expedition had lost him his Cabinet seat, Churchill had gone back to soldiering. He had been offered the command of a brigade on the now entrenched Western Front, and had tried unsuccessfully to get this ...”

“... to be withdrawn from the mainland to try to hold the line in Crete, itself abandoned at the end of May. At the same time, the new Iraqi regime bombed the British base at Habbaniya. The capture of Ethiopia that month, and the return of its emperor, Haile Selassie, was of little consolation. Wavell was now in Churchill’s sights. The last straw was his initial ...”

“... January 1940, Staël, who had enlisted in the Foreign Legion, joined his regiment in Algeria. In May, France confronted defeat, but it was not until September that Staël was demobilised and rejoined Jeannine and her son, who had moved to Nice. In 1942 Jeannine gave birth to a daughter, Anne, and, in September 1943, all four moved back to Paris, which was ...”

“... Descriptions​ of Richard Titmuss often drew on the language of otherworldliness. He was ‘the high priest of the welfare state’ according to an assessment quoted in the ODNB. His entry there considers, though judiciously rejects, his frequent characterisation as a ‘saint’; understandably, it doesn’t cite his LSE colleague Michael Oakeshott’s description of him as ‘a snake in saint’s clothing ...”

“... what could be a meter. He says he’s working at a house nearby but needs to check our drain which may have a hairline crack. He makes to come in, but I say that if there is any work needs doing we have a builder of our own and in any case my partner deals with all that. He then claims to have spoken to my ‘boyfriend’ who says it’s OK. I shut the door on ...”

“... birds.’ Robin is more likely to be a nickname for Robert, though the resonance with ‘robber’ may also count for something, and Hood may suggest his frequent disguises, for Robin is a great trickster whose masquerades inevitably bamboozle his foolish oppressors: he specialises in pretending to help people capture Robin ...”

“... this approach, that it replaces the problems of majority rule with the problems of minority rule, may be correct but misses the point, which is ethical not operational: people, born free, shouldn’t have to abide by decisions that affect them but to which they do not consent. Non-coercive social relations must be prefiguratively and painstakingly built in ...”

“... British Consulate in Florence on 29 September 1913, a Monday. According to his death certificate, Richard Roberts, a 67-year-old Justice of the Peace and builder, staying at the Hotel Londres & Métropole in Florence, died at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova on Saturday, 27 September 1913. The consul, Alfred Lemon, was informed of the death by R. Ellis ...”

“... Richard and Clare Winston are well-known as the authors of elegant and accurate translations of some of Thomas Mann’s essays and correspondence, including The Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889-1955. While annotating that selection, Richard Winston began assembling material for what he intended to be an extensive biography of the writer ...”

“... media, and deployed his wealth to political and personal advantage. (In 2008, in a verdict that may or may not have been political in nature, he and his wife were convicted in absentia of a multi-million-pound property cheat.) He was cheerfully unabashed about diverting government largess towards regions that voted for ...”