“... was chosen for the harem of the Xianfeng emperor of the Qing dynasty in 1852. In 1856 she rose steeply in rank after giving birth to the first (and as it happened only) male heir to the throne. When the emperor died in 1861, Cixi’s five-year-old son became the Tongzhi emperor. A regency of six male officials along with the late emperor’s ...”

“... 1978-79 many rank-and-file trade unionists saw union power as a greater threat to democracy than Margaret Thatcher, and voted Tory in 1979. The subdued American Bicentennial of 1976 had taken place in the shadow of Watergate, presided over by an unelected president, Gerald Ford, brought in first to replace a besmirched vice president, Spiro Agnew, and then a ...”

“... of the principle of ‘collective responsibility’ to decay into the decorative. Indeed, Crossman rose to be Lord President of the Council, spending more time with the Queen and on ceremonial matters than any modern Tory would care to. (Incidentally, think how the tone of politics might be altered if the archaic word ‘privy’ in the title Privy Councillor ...”

“... but few would agree with the strategy of immediately sending troops because George Bush and Margaret Thatcher assumed that wogs could be told to behave by the white man: there is a pattern of such contemptuous attitudes towards the Arab world, from the days of the British expeditionary force sent to Egypt in 1882 to put down the Orabi rebellion to the ...”

“... have been constructed, each with its own seductive charm. There is the Faraday publicly admired by Margaret Thatcher (and her successor no doubt), the Faraday who without the privilege of a university education but with bags of initiative rose from book-binder’s apprentice at the age of 14 to such eminence in science that ...”

“... riot, at about the time when the class whose anguish they unilaterally exploited was busy voting Margaret Thatcher, madonna of bother, into everlasting power. In brisk response to market forces, the movement began to publish and distribute a paper under the same Class War label. These propaganda sheets, as is the way of the world, were then collected in more ...”

“... women whom he associated with the city’s contaminating sensuousness. Recording some gossip about Margaret Fuller and her Italian lover in his notebook, Hawthorne turned on his former friend with contempt and loathing: her feeling for Ossoli was ‘purely sensual’, and she herself had a ‘defective and evil nature’. The pattern recurred in his brief, if ...”

“... in Chihuahua and instructed his editors that he didn’t want Diaz touched with so much as a rose petal in his publications. None of Bierce’s fiction did well, and his publishers all went promptly bankrupt. His sons died in circumstances of squalid debauchery. His wife divorced him after a long unhappy marriage. In 1913 Bierce apologised to his friends ...”

“... of real merit, but they would probably have been the first to admit that they were among those who rose to sanctity by clinging to the coattails, or more exactly the robes, of Ignatius Loyola and Philip Neri. So much for the growth of cults at the periphery. But there is also the problem of explaining how and why some of these cults were adopted by the centre ...”

“... the ledgers suggest, his portraiture fleshes out: a craft specialist from small-town Flanders who rose by his wits to society’s second floor, moving among the mandarins who served the region’s ruler and leaving the guild members down below. The little ‘souvenir’ panels on show in Ghent presented five fellow movers in this world, the jauntiest a ...”

“... the Flood and its aftermath were often resolved by appeal to the holdings of virtuosi museums. As Margaret Nickson informs us here in her helpful analysis of Sloane’s library, Wilkins’s work was one of the first folios which the young Hans Sloane purchased when he reached London as an ambitious apothecary in the early 1680s. Decades later, various drafts ...”

“... Whoever thought otherwise? The popular answer is that this was the general proposition asserted by Margaret Thatcher when she uttered this phrase – which, once uttered, she was never allowed to forget. Like many famous quotations, it has been snatched out of its original context. The fact is that in an interview with Woman’s Own in October 1987, Thatcher ...”

“... world makes itself continuously felt in these letters. A parade of distinguished visitors, from Margaret Fuller Ossoli to Goethe’s grandson, pays court to the Brownings in Florence. On a sojourn in Paris, the poets finally manage a much anticipated meeting with George Sand, who – greatly to Arabella’s disapproval, apparently – begins their ...”

“... world of the living.Many of the best ghost stories were written by women (Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Margaret Oliphant, Edith Nesbit and Edith Wharton all made notable contributions to the tradition), and they often depicted extremes of female experience. The phantoms in these stories carried warnings, admonitions or silent appeals for justice. Violet Paget, who ...”

“... a credible commitment to moderation, was halted – but by the unions themselves, as much as by Margaret Thatcher. It has given us an economy in which organised labour has very little real corporate power. This is a situation without parallel in any other European state. In different ways, unions in France, Germany and Italy carry a good deal more clout ...”