“... She wrote:I thought I was indulging in play, and lost myself.O for the day that is dying!At home I was secluded, unknown,When I left home, my fame spread far and wide,The pious laid all their merit at my feet.O for the day that is dying!My beauty was like a warehouse filled with rare merchandise,Which drew men from ...”

“... between its crowded banks. At dusk, holding a drink by the window and waiting for Jane to return home, I loved to see the city streetlights arrive in amber hesitations. But London was swallowing everything we earned. My extravagant tastes were surely not helping. For these I blame my late father. In 1959, Father, who had been teaching theology at Durham ...”

“... her distant new husband, ‘so Instead of Dressing showily, or behaving usefully – I sate at home and wrote Verses.’ But Thrale wasn’t impressed and Johnson stepped into the void, translating the Odes of Boethius in alternate verses with his hostess and helping to publish the poetry (most famously a popular ballad, ‘The Three Warnings’) that ...”

“... and 12th centuries were the cheerleaders for Mary, and pilgrims to sites throughout Europe took home news of cures and miracles and carried her devotion far and wide. Between 1000 and 1200, as the parish structure was set into place throughout the continent, statues of Mary appeared in almost every church. Over the next two centuries she was made ‘local ...”

“... Kemble was an abolitionist; and her incipient feminism could scarcely have bumped up against a ‘lord and master’ – the irony is hers – more inclined to insist on his conventional prerogatives. Though she had married partly under the illusion that she could thereby exchange her theatrical career for a literary one, the couple had scarcely returned from ...”

“... Union during the devolution campaign of the late 1970s, Trevor-Roper had taken the title of Lord Dacre of Glanton, and had left the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford for the mastership of Peterhouse, the oldest and most conservative college in Cambridge. His years at Peterhouse (from 1980 to 1987) were far from happy. An ultra-reactionary ...”

“... instance, I was reassured to find myself not alone in feeling like this. On the death of Crabbe Lord Melbourne wrote: ‘I am always glad when one of those fellows dies for then I know I have the whole of him on my shelf.’ Which is, of course, the cue for biography.This is the fifth play on which Nicholas Hytner and I have collaborated, not counting two ...”

“... to land ownership, which persists in a more democratic form in the national obsession with home ownership, overrode every other concern, then as now with mixed results. Despite threats to the preservation of Hadrian’s Wall and Stonehenge, both Houses of Parliament fiercely resisted the first Ancient Monuments Protection Bill, which took nine years ...”

“... seven speakers. It was ‘highly interesting’, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, adding: ‘Lord knows what I didn’t read into their reading.’ Supposedly a secret society, it largely remained so until after the Second World War. The first and most enduring members were Molly and Desmond MacCarthy, Roger Fry, Maynard Keynes, Vanessa and Clive ...”

“... of glass’, and chambers that in size and opulence outdid some of Henry’s permanent houses back home – merited the simplest and greatest of comparisons: ‘Leonardo,’ he wrote, ‘could not have done it so well.’ The Field of Cloth of Gold’s scale and complexity reflected the momentous nature of the encounter: the first meeting, in person, between ...”

“... are relatively discreet – not surprisingly, as this could have got Maisky into real trouble at home – while the 1960s memoirs make bolder claims. Of his quick decision after the German attack on the Soviet Union to do everything in his power to push the Allies to open a Second Front in Europe, Maisky wrote in his memoirs: ‘I did not think I had the ...”

“... fame grew, much of the mid-Victorian establishment came to hear him, including the prime ministers Lord John Russell and Gladstone. Tyndall was never tempted to take up a professional post outside London, partly because he was unfamiliar with university teaching and research – some academic physicists like James Clerk Maxwell disparaged his lack of higher ...”

“... from the noisy minority of activists constantly trying to do Britain down’ – the Museum of the Home in East London, for instance, which until 2019 was named the Geffrye Museum, after one of many assiduous British slavers who made large fortunes and amassed great collections from the trade of an estimated 3.1 million Africans. Arguing against the return of ...”

“... Woman’s Breasts & Bum”’. The following day, Salmond gave a press conference near his home town, Linlithgow, describing the investigation as ‘flawed and bereft of natural justice’. Last year, Woman B told me she spent that weekend trawling social media. ‘Not a word of a lie, I didn’t eat, I didn’t sleep or drink anything,’ she ...”

“... It was a test I sometimes failed. Sohail was 17 years older than the country he sometimes called home and sometimes hell. Usually when he rang, he would recite a few lines from the Sufi poets with gaiety in his voice, and occasionally he even laughed at my attempts at Punjabi double entendres. But this time his tone was sombre. ‘I’m going back.’ I was ...”