“... girlfriend, a poor but pretty ballad-seller, is being violently interrupted by an older woman who may be his wife, and who, if we believe the account of the picture by Hogarth’s friend Jean André Rouquet, is also pregnant. The two women are rivals in politics as well as in love, the younger selling pro-Hanoverian papers, the older Jacobite ones. Apart from ...”

“... attitudes have persisted. Confronted in 1989 with the bicentennial of the French Revolution, we may still feel inclined to see that event through the complacent, uncomprehending and too easily condemning eyes of a Sidney Carton or a Scarlet Pimpernel. And this is deeply unfair. Yet traditional British distance from – and distaste for – the French ...”

“... like the Casement diaries, or even those jottings about payment to sailors in Paris which Housman may or may not have left among his surviving writings. Leaves of Grass, especially the ‘Calamus’ section, may be as easy to interpret now as The Shropshire Lad, but neither gives us any ...”

“... and music patron Baron Gottfried van Swieten, the guardian angel of Mozart’s late style. Richard Taruskin accuses Stravinsky of lying about the original idea of The Rite of Spring, which was visual and frankly ‘Scriabinistic’ rather than purely musical. In various autobiographical statements Stravinsky dismissed the help of Nicholas Roerich in ...”

“... writers is more remarkable than what happens to the rest of mankind, merely that through them we may see ordinary events more vividly because we have glimpses of how they appeared to minds exceptionally lucid or devious, and can measure how little separates such minds from our own, when it comes to the ordinary business of living. The historical periods of ...”

“... did in 1899, that ‘there is no elementary manual of English manufacture by which a student may learn to pass an examination in sociology with the least possible trouble,’ we might as well relax: the extravagant ambition has gone, the subject is domesticated, and its adherents may safely graze. There is nevertheless ...”

“... What is history for? What do we want it to do? In 1731, an obscure Kentish schoolmaster named Richard Spencer offered some answers. Properly to ascertain his position in geographical space, he reasoned, required not a single map, but access to a global atlas, one that would allow him to ‘see what London and the adjacent parts are in the kingdom; what the kingdom is in Europe, and what Europe is in the universe ...”

“... junior members of the Bar, ever sycophantic in their quest for advancement. Though the Telegraph may have been seeking to protect the innocence of its readers, there is nothing unusual in an ageing QC using his money and position to gain young admirers; nor about a gap between perceptions of the public and the private man. Yet, despite the excesses to which ...”

“... godhead. Often, the searchers will carry props with them and carry out recognition tests: the boys may be shown a collection of artefacts, some of which belonged to the previous bodhisattva, and asked to pick from them. Candidates may also be marked out by physical signs, such as abnormally long earlobes – a Tibetan ...”

“... Other, less basic venues soon sprang up. In Charlotte Street, the prosperous Communard Victor Richard opened a grocery which became a centre of advice and help for arriving refugees – and a haunt for police spies. A few doors along, Elisabeth Audinet – a militant in the radical socialist Blanquist faction – ran a restaurant. These places resounded ...”

“... on the backside – and Eva and Maria did not make a sound.’ Or a wife is being punished, it may be: ‘As they descended the first flight of stairs, they heard a sharp sound that, as Mary said later, could as easily have been an object dropped as a face slapped.’ Such negations are alive, everywhere and diversely. ‘For reasons they could no longer ...”

“... on the sinfulness and transience of tyranny. Robert Hillenbrand’s meditations on Eastern ruins may similarly lead his readers to thoughts of mortality and transience. Many of the buildings he studies in Islamic Architecture have an overt function – whether prayer, teaching, interment or pleasure – yet seem to have been built with other, covert aims, as ...”

“... It may be that only the truly self-absorbed can make art out of self-effacement. This at least is one of the suggestions of the first volume of Christopher Isherwood’s Diaries, a whingeing, inward-bound mammoth of a book, where the author laboriously chronicles and inspects his every moment for changes in the moral and spiritual weather ...”

“... natural order rather than a debatable preference, he skips away from honest debate. Of course, he may be right. His opponents may be the unwitting occupants of Trotsky’s dustbin, wasting their lives on dreams as impossible as restoring the Bourbons. The seriousness with which he deserves to be treated ...”

“... after the ejection of his patron (and former Lord High Admiral) James II. When Pepys died in May 1703, aged 70, the autopsy confirmed that he had lived hard: his lungs were full of black spots, his kidneys full of stones and his gut was discoloured and septic. And of course he wrote a diary, nine large volumes of it, which he began on 1 January 1660 and ...”