“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... part in it. Then Douglas Carswell, the Tory backwoodsman who has tabled a motion of no confidence, rose and demanded that time be made available for a debate. ‘It’s not a substantive motion,’ the Speaker replied. ‘Oh yes it is,’ came voices from all sides. Extraordinary. I’ve never seen the Speaker heckled before. It was like watching Ceausescu’s ...”

“... the bomb’s principal designer, was given the honour of making the first toast: Glass in hand, I rose, and said something like: ‘May all our devices explode as successfully as today’s, but always over test sites and never over cities.’ The table fell silent, as if I had said something indecent. Everyone froze. [Deputy Minister of Defence, Marshal ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Peter Jones on Symons Street and turning up towards Cadogan Square. On entering the house, you rose in a coffin-like lift to the top and walked down to the first half-landing, where the door of her place would be open. Inside, if it was summer, you could browse the skyline of West London through her picture window, probably as far as the southern edge of ...”

“... with the nearest thing the Party had to a piping hot Gladstonian internationalist, in the form of Margaret Thatcher. As Simms reminds us, she strode up and down at the edge of the fray, incandescent. ‘This is in the heart of Europe,’ she fumed down the telephone to the Mayor of Bihac in 1994, ‘and the lack of effective action has robbed Nato of its ...”

“... clutch of recent biographies has toppled several notable royal icons from their pedestals. Kenneth Rose depicted George V as an ogre so boorish and philistine that in retrospect he appears almost pathetically comical. In his books on Edward VIII, Michael Bloch has washed a great deal of the Abdication dirty linen in public, and much of the mud has stuck to the ...”

“... of mirth. ‘You’ve got a chance in a place like this,’ says a sixty-year-old woman called Rose at the opening of Harold Pinter’s first play, The Room. ‘It was the alcoholics’ paradise,’ Barry Humphries writes in his introduction to Darren Coffield’s entertaining book.You merely ran up a slate. Later, much later, came the reckoning, but you ...”

“... to rabbits and steak had to be pushed through a drum sieve and, as Landemare’s contemporary Margaret Powell recalled laconically, ‘This wasn’t easy.’ Every kitchen maid’s ambition was to learn enough to move up the service hierarchy. Landemare managed this in 1901, when she went to work for Edward Dunbar Kilburn, who had made a fortune in the ...”