“... projecting unspecified rays from his tower at Wardenclyffe in a direction slightly west of due north, had mistaken his aim by a small but fatal angle, causing the beam to miss Peary’s base at Ellesmere Island, cross the Polar region over into Siberia, and hit the Stony Tunguska instead. Reading this passage in the spirit of Bernard Carlson’s ...”

“... copies across the border instead of his usual smuggled butter. We might have called it the Black North, for being dark with Protestants, but when I was a child in the 1960s, Ulster was the place British sweets came from: Spangles, Buttons and, most notably, Opal Fruits. It was across this border that the feminists of ‘the condom train’ staged a mass ...”

“... peace at any price, just as he had preferred the emollient Rab Butler to the more abrasive Oliver Lyttelton for the Treasury. Butler was in fact attracted by the most daring of all breakout policies, the most tantalising of all the might-have-beens: the plan to let the pound float and so avoid all the sterling crises that bedevilled British governments ...”

“... under arms: virtually the entire military-age population of the South and a good proportion of the North as well. Very large armies – sometimes 100,000 to a side – fought scores of deadly pitched battles and hundreds of smaller ones in which casualty rates were routinely 20-25 per cent: 620,000 men died; cities were bombed and burned to the ...”

“... England’s Greatest River (1907), Ackroyd discovers in this 214-mile journey, from Cotswolds to North Sea, a mirror for national identity. The river is a constant in history and the river is history, of a persuasion that reminds me of childhood favourites such as Henrietta Marshall’s Our Island Story, originally published in 1905 and glossed as ‘A ...”

“... unspecific as to whether she was pointing the finger at Thomas or his collateral descendant Oliver (also no slouch at creating ruins). Amid much that is familiar, James Clark’s absorbing and formidable study presents much that is refreshingly new, as might be expected after a lifetime of scholarly work on late medieval English monastic life. Clark ...”

“... the teenage Shakespeare’s alleged sojourn among the Lancashire recusants, first put forward by Oliver Baker in 1937 but given much fuller and more closely argued treatment by Honigmann. One might expect a biographer to feel obliged to pass judgment as to whether an episode with such far-reaching implications actually happened or not, but Honan declines to ...”

“... not begin with ‘Sunday Morning’, but Jonathan Barker suggests that Ron Butlin, James Lasdun, Oliver Reynolds and other talents have been influenced, like Vendler’s Americans, by the world of Canon Aspirin. This seems doubtful. To read the PBS volume after the Faber Book is to be almost crushed by the pressure of social detail. It is to enter a ...”

“... response is considered, inter alia, by Terence Ranger in Epidemics and Ideas). And there is Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, on the outbreak of encephalitis lethargia that was triggered by the flu. But that’s it. Most people know more about smallpox, or the plague of 1665. Why should this be? The flu was unprecedented in its virulence and global in its ...”

“... ancient allies and enemies yawning together on platforms at Boulder, Colorado, or Grand Forks, North Dakota. ‘Prisoners of the Press Conference’, as Ann Charters captions them. Explainers of what is gone, apologists for what never happened. Literary stocks busking to sustain their market value, justify the next complimentary, two-seat air ticket. Corso ...”

“... Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In fact the picture is Victorian, painted in about 1845, but the artist – James ...”

“... to British naval supremacy and a local hilltop was equipped with big guns pointing towards the North Sea. By the time of the Second World War, barrage balloons and anti-aircraft guns had been added to the defences, while a narrow-gauge railway ran around the coast to a pier that had been built to ship arms and other supplies to the fortified islands out in ...”

“... new edition is closely based, was always a spunkier affair than the Oxford Dictionary. It had the North American bias implied by its title. It larged up Abraham Lincoln (69 quotations as against 16 in the 1979 Oxford), and was full of the kinds of remark that journalists might want to quote, then Google, and then guiltily think they ought to check in one of ...”

“... above parliaments, that a true citizen swears loyalty to a constitution and not to a cabinet. As Oliver Cromwell told Parliament in 1654, ‘in every government there must be somewhat fundamental, somewhat like a Magna Carta, that should be standing and unalterable.’ The quotation comes from Linda Colley’s latest, largest and most adventurous work. It ...”

“... in 1983 whether James was ‘two kings or one?’, so different were his historical reputations north and south of the border. Wormald and other historians have done much to establish James’s political agility and challenge the homophobia and xenophobia that skewed interpretations of him alive and dead. But the caricature of a weak king drooling over his ...”