“... of change Perplexes monarchs. According to Milton’s early biographer, the Irish republican John Toland, Charles II’s Licenser for the Press regarded these lines as subversive, and wanted to suppress the whole poem. Immediately after the passage in which he imagines God hatching the universe out of the abyss, Milton asks: what in me is dark ...”

“... very soon, I lose the markers by which I have navigated, the beacons by which I know myself. Like John Clare leaving the tight circle of experience around the village of Helpston (then in Northamptonshire), I step out of my knowledge, to the tottering edge of an abyss known as ‘the future’ or ‘the human contract’. Mortality. Of place and ...”

“... say’, ‘to be sure’), to rank with Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, Willie Morris’s North toward Home, and other urban romances of the ardent outsider whose eyes are on the prize. Still, it’s handy to have it back in print after its long stay in limbo, for documentary purposes. It gives virgin readers an opportunity to see what all the ...”

“... though even less tolerant towards ‘Rome’, was less solidly home-grown in inspiration. John Knox’s church drew its theological ideas from constant European travel, the movement of black-clad divines between Edinburgh and the Calvinist centres in Geneva, the Netherlands and Germany.The third attempt to turn the white cliffs into a red line is the ...”

“... Mediterranean and the Danube basin were for a long time privileged zones – the terrains of St John Philby and Robert Byron, of Norman Douglas and Patrick Leigh-Fermor, of R.W.Seton-Watson and Rebecca West. Sorties farther afield – like Peter Fleming’s expeditions to the Gobi or Matto Grosso – were fewer. Paradoxically, the vast expanse of the Empire ...”

“... privacy was largely left by the common law to the law of trespass. If, as Lord Camden said in the North Briton case, the eye cannot trespass, the answer was to build a wall. If you had no property you had no privacy. The law was no better advanced when in 1990 the actor Gorden Kaye, who was seriously ill in hospital when journalists conned their way into his ...”

“... to marry them. In Lichfield, the geographical centre of Middle England, a statue of Captain Edward John Smith of the Titanic stands in a park bestowing dangerous blessings on newly-wed couples emerging from the nearby register office. In McKie’s version of England the past is generally not allowed to assert itself as a moral yardstick, a measure of decline ...”

“... the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama – “when he and his cronies in the White ...”

“... managed to get to America at all. Did Sir Richard Hawkins say his latitude was 48°, three degrees north of where he ought to have been? Then he meant 50° 48' – ‘how so obvious an error got into the text is immaterial.’ He saw a peopled country with many fires? That could easily be the uninhabited Falklands, where lightning can ignite the tussock-grass ...”

“... of being the token Black woman on the shortlist and of being rejected. She applied to Hackney North and Stoke Newington only because her secretary at the film technicians’ union, where she was equality officer, drafted the letter for her. She was up against a popular sitting MP, Ernie Roberts, as well as the leader of the local council, who had been all ...”

“... was protective. ‘I shot enough sultry looks round the MGM photo gallery to melt the North Pole.’ Most of Hollywood’s leading men fell for her and she took her pick. She was famously married: Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, Frank Sinatra. Shaw was the cultivated one. He hated her walking round the house in her bare feet and was shocked to discover ...”

“... twenty years between the two wars, he had spent much of his time in an infantry battalion on the North-West Frontier, where, more interested in Indian life than in polo or big game, he had been passed over for promotion. In 1939, at the outbreak of war, he was still a captain, and he owed his rapid promotion to the new attitudes. That our paths ever crossed ...”

“... August, Oxfordshire. We turn off the Burford Road to look again at William Wilcote’s tomb at North Leigh, knowing, though, from our last visit that some well-meaning vicar has desecrated the little masterpiece of a chapel by kitting it out with serpentine-blue upholstered chairs and a garish triptych on the altar – the clergy so often no better ...”

“... is also a vast outpouring of Bach recordings, which, until DGG curtailed the series, included John Eliot Gardiner’s amazing cantata performances. One of these took place every week for a year all over Europe and North America – the intention was to match the composer’s own Sunday series for the churches he served ...”

“... early life that made him the man and writer he was, but of what he found at hand on the North Shore of Long Island between October 1922 and May 1924, when he was living in a comfortable cottage at 6 Gateway Drive and writing in an office above the garage. Scholars have long known that the leading women in Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan and Jordan ...”