“... she knew it to have arisen. Though she would not want to be caught in a political dalliance with John Stuart Mill, MacKinnon would surely second his claim that ‘the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal.’ But MacKinnon is not without concern that many women suffer from such equiphobia as well – or rather, that ...”

“... Sidney Zebel (1973). Dennis Judd’s Balfour and the British Empire (1968) explored so many of the major issues of his career, including the Boer War, tariff reform and imperial defence, as to constitute the better part of a biography in itself. At this stage of the proceedings, we stand in need either of a moratorium on the subject, or of something special ...”

“... had just inherited in shady circumstances, after furious litigation, a fortune from her friend Sir John Scott: but there was perpetual bickering and backbiting about the allowance. One of Harold’s reasons for seeking in 1929 the more lucrative path of journalism was to escape dependence upon his half-mad mother-in-law. Harold Nicolson was born in 1886 in ...”

“... convention was notable for the near total absence of the word ‘abortion’. Gay marriage, the major threat to American values in George W. Bush’s campaigns, turned out not to destroy the country after all when Obama enacted it. Now the enemy within is transgender people. According to Trump, ‘You’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you ...”

“... trench warfare on the Western Front. Professor Graham’s theme is the one endlessly inculcated by John Terraine and now finding wider acceptance among military historians: that the British Army’s great series of victories in 1918 should be seen as the ‘pay-off’ for lessons painfully learned in the previous three years. The early British offensives, made ...”

“... say, Vic Damone – or would it have been Andy Williams? Things have changed, I know, and Elton John is now a sort of minor Royal, but still . . . Something sufficiently Alf-like squats in Glenn, we’re led to feel. He likes to come across as icily on top of things but we can sense a crock of inner turmoil. And his relationship with spoken English is ...”

“... came to his rescue, but that was only an opening round. Days later, according to Professor John Hunwick, Kaduna ‘was gripped with fear and panic as armed Muslims roamed the streets, killing, looting and burning’. Only 24 persons were reported killed, but many churches, schools and other properties were wrecked, while the counter-attacking ...”

“... classic slob biography – to be compared with Bob Woodward’s Wired, about the grossed-out comic John Belushi, and almost any book about Elvis Presley – and Mr Katz is a first-rank slob biographer. A vital element in such a project is the contrast between subject and biographer: the dull, ascetic and probably jogging yuppy sees in the fluid-spilling and ...”

“... in the world when it was wrecked in the late 16th century. The ship gave its name to Port Saint John, where it is believed to have sunk on its return from Cochin China, with a cargo of spices and china, but my friend has been picking up a quantity of cannonshot as well as pieces of willow pattern-like china. Drilling down into the sandbank at the edge of ...”

“... bay. ‘Live upon sixpence a day – and earn it’ was the cure for gout advocated by the surgeon John Abernethy. The traffic in quack cures for gout in the 18th century well merits the description ‘Aesculapian bedlam’. But gout did not monopolise the scene. In the 1740s the gout wars were heavily overshadowed by the pamphlets of Bishop Berkeley, the ...”

“... their wounds kissed better, we can be distracted from the worst of pains, since attention is a major and early factor in its development. Pain even dismisses itself when there are more urgent priorities. The need to get away from danger, or towards safety, can put pain into abeyance: many soldiers wounded in battle do not feel pain until behind the ...”

“... glorified knocking shop with overpriced drinks and rooms to rent upstairs’, Keeler met a Major Jim Eynan. He wanted to go to bed with her in the afternoons, she says, ‘and, for nearly two years, he often did. Ours was a commercial situation for Jim always advanced me some money for rent or helped out financially in other ways.’ Keeler may or may ...”

“... but aposiopesis may be allowed as a structural feature, as when Yeats ends his ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’ by claiming that he cannot continue his roll call of Gregory’s friends because ‘a thought/Of that late death took all my heart for speech.’ We may grant Yeats command of that trick and also say that to confront horror with irony ...”

“... their eyewitness statements an accurate reconstruction of the position and deployment of all the major regiments. But there was one witness, the Duke of Wellington, who would not comply with Siborne’s investigation. Wellington insisted that Siborne’s model captured only one moment of the action, and moreover allowed each soldier to choose from memory his ...”

“... but have not yet arrived at the perfection of putting it on the right way,’ he wrote to John Cam Hobhouse of his duties in March 1820, adding: ‘Nobody has been stabbed this winter.’ Things were different the following winter. After the Guicciolis’ separation, Byron grew close to Ruggiero and Pietro Gamba, who were key figures in the Romagna ...”