“... or happy. Steedman is concerned to find this thinking at the level of daily life. She shows us John Locke writing to his Somerset friends, the Clarkes, asking advice about servants and ‘weighing up the capacities, abilities and personalities’ of the Clarkes’ maids. In contrast to his thoughts on the toilet training, washing and dressing of ...”

“... East End to high-rise development. High-rise is debated here with attention to its proponents (who took to saying that high-rises, made out to be heaven, were hardly the hell they were to be accused of being) and with a more noticeable attention to those who felt they were hell, that Candleford to high-rise, so to speak, was a wrong direction. There are pages ...”

“... harbours and through torpedo nets. Another spectacular display of effective heroism, noted by John Gooch in Mussolini’s War, was the all-out charge of the Savoia Cavalleria, the Italian equivalent of the Life Guards, when 650 mounted men with sabres and pistols broke a Russian infantry regiment some 2000-strong at Izbushenski on 24 August 1942. Sans ...”

“... for a Cuban visa in Mexico City before the assassination was not Oswald but an impostor. The FBI took over Oswald’s possessions and tried to conceal the fact that he owned hundreds of dollars’ worth of espionage equipment including a Minox ‘spy camera’. Summers’s book is full of this kind of heavily suggestive but not-quite-conclusive ...”

“... should ‘decide when would be the proper time to drop one’. According to Ann and John Tusa, Winston Churchill, then out of office, ‘went on a solitary rampage, growling that the Russians must be told to retreat from Berlin or “we will raze their cities.” ’ Perhaps he had only old-fashioned razing in mind. (Lord Boothby has put it on ...”

“... high-powered grammar schools and industrial workbenches that produced men such as Penney and John Corner: at times, one feels transported to one of those Fifties films in which middle-aged young men in macs and hats and black spectacles are forever jumping into Daimlers and roaring down to Wallingford. The target of the British bomb, as has long been ...”

“... the accompanying turf wars that claim so many academic casualties. He has written biographies of John Winthrop, Ezra Stiles, Roger Williams and George Washington; political histories of the Stamp Act crisis and the causes of the American Revolution; social histories of family life in colonial New England and Virginia; intellectual histories of Puritan ...”

“... 1840s the two most notable Greek histories in Britain, and indeed in Europe, were by the Scotsman John Gillies, who dedicated his work to George III with the assurance that it exemplified ‘the dangerous Turbulence of Democracy’, and the outspokenly Tory William Mitford. Macaulay noted Mitford’s liking for Sparta and dislike of Athens; Byron declared ...”

“... she should take the fight all the way to the Democratic convention in August. And then there was John McCain, in what seemed to be a high school auditorium somewhere in Louisiana (even he wasn’t sure: he thought he was in New Orleans, but he wasn’t), addressing a few hundred sleepy geriatrics, struggling with the teleprompter and grinning weirdly at ...”

“... was seamed with cracks into which ‘wedges’ could be driven. The Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote 20 years ago that American statesmen in the postwar period never ‘believed in the existence of an international Communist monolith’. After reading Selverstone’s work, it would be hard to accept that judgment. But at almost all times ...”

“... sped him and 15,000 Dutch soldiers to Torbay on the auspicious date of 5 November; but he also took care to smooth the path of providence by means of a web of alliances with dissident members of the British ruling class. Some time before the invasion William altered his mission from policy change to regime change: he now intended to take the throne for ...”

“... the very depths’ but in reality was only congratulating itself on its cleverness. Above all he took it – this was in 1971 – as just one more instance of what he saw as happening to the study of language and literature everywhere: the human stakes were being removed, words were playing among themselves, no agents or intentions were to be seen.And yet ...”

“... best-known Committee on Social Thought (established with family money by the economic historian John Nef), are tiny departments cutting across disciplinary specialism and empowered in certain cases to award undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. Hutchins’s Committee on the Liberal Arts was financed from the outside and was used by him to publicise his ...”

“... bestiality has been, and remains, a lot more common than most of us think. He explains how it took place in the past. In the cavalry, for instance, ‘with such an intimate bond between horse and rider’, and with women scarce and horses freely available, it naturally occurred to some officers that there was more than one useful way to mount a horse ...”

“... she regarded as frivolous, insisting on balls and parties which exhausted their menfolk and took them away from their work. ‘It is the wives – confound them,’ she wrote. ‘They take no sort of interest in what is going on, know no Arabic and see no Arabs. They create an exclusive (it’s also a very second-rate) English society quite cut off from ...”