“... no higher tribute to the late Prince Consort than by dedicating the first several Idylls of the King to his memory as ‘Scarce other than my king’s ideal knight’. Between them, the two Tennysons illustrated two major aspects of the chivalric obsession. Fancy expanded into pretentiousness which then lapsed into ...”

“... narrator was born and grew up, and which Deighton knew only as the destination of parcels at the King’s Cross sorting office where he’d worked over one Christmas holiday. Giving the character Lancashire origins was an attempt to put some distance between author and narrator, a distance narrowed by the films. Harry Palmer is a Londoner. Deighton was born ...”

“... In adjacent fields social history has achieved surprising levels of sophistication, capped by Roger Cooter’s provocative study of phrenology as an intellectual instrument of self-help liberalism and social control (The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science, 1984). But hardly any attempt has been made to apply this sort of approach to Darwinism – to ...”

“... if sedition were being brewed on their premises. This was a significant threat: shortly after the king backed down from his banning order, several proprietors were arrested for continuing to permit ‘seditious discourses, and spreading false and seditious news’. Until the end of Charles II’s reign, and beyond, London’s coffee houses continued to be ...”

“... and several more besides. In August 1873, writing to one of his favourite correspondents, Edma Roger des Genettes, he claimed that since the previous September he had read and made notes on 194 titles, and his final estimate was that he had consulted some 1500 in all – a research curriculum the like of which can seldom if ever have crossed the mind of ...”

“... was probably the nature of the thumb-sized toy encountered in 1267 by the Franciscan philosopher Roger Bacon, who, with forgivable exaggeration, recorded a noise ‘exceeding the roar of strong thunder and a flash brighter than the most brilliant lightning’. Paper could also be wrapped around canvas compartments to add stages to a firework’s incandescent ...”

“... spirits which they didn’t know how to use in moderation. ‘Why don’t you write to your great King,’ one of the natives said, ‘that he prohibit these beverages from being brought in, since they kill us?’ The Jesuit replied that the French needed these drinks in order to face the oceanic voyages and incredible cold of these regions. ‘Then make it ...”

“... later Elizabethan churchmen had viewed the Presbyterian threat and the prospect of a Scottish king as head of the Church of England, but there was less need for nerves after 1604, when the esteem of bishops seems to have risen among the laity. The troubled Parliaments of the 1620s produced no challenge to the episcopal office. If the term ...”

“... of internecine Christian theological dispute. All this, one might expect from the cofounder (with Roger Scruton) of the Conservative Philosophy Group. But Casey is not only conservative (and, besides, presents the interesting spectacle of a man who has been getting steadily less conservative with age). He was educated at a provincial English grammar school by ...”

“... Among the new recruits, he recalled, there was a strong feeling that people ‘like the deposed King and Mrs Simpson’ had deceived the public about Nazism, encouraging them to see it as a bulwark against Bolshevism and depicting the greatest evil as another war with Germany. This naturally led to a counter, pro-Russian feeling, which has since been ...”

“... gang up on their targets. Phillips details the case of a Californian teenager called Chelsea King, who was raped and murdered in February 2010. Her relatives were treated as fair game, and supportive strangers who tried to intervene were themselves tracked down and hounded. RIP trolling treats grief as an exploitable state. It isn’t that the trolls ...”

“... civilisation, pace Chesterton, is founded on coal.’ In The Language of George Orwell (1995), Roger Fowler went into a good deal of detail concerning the ‘authoritarian force’ of the generalisations (many of them sustained by a generic ‘one’) on which the political writing relies. Woloch does not engage fully with this less sanguine ...”

“... at Çayönü in Turkey. A mass of bodies, primarily infants, are currently being excavated by Roger and Wendy Matthews of the University of Reading from a single building at the early Neolithic site of Bestansur in northern Iraq. Signs of multiple burials have been found below house floors in late Neolithic sites throughout the region. Many Neolithic ...”

“... made it necessary for him to have a pseudonym or two at his disposal, and so we find ‘Captain King’ issuing instructions to his agents and arranging assignations in seedy hotels. Masters resorts to cautious speculation when the facts can’t be ascertained, showing, for example, an impossible familiarity with his subject’s state of mind at 14. This ...”