“... so that Britain’s main task was to avoid disrupting it. The Tory approach was opposed by Lord Palmerston, the driver of the Liberal Party’s foreign policy from 1830 to 1865, who could not resist associating British policy with various progressive and national causes that threatened to disrupt or at least annoy the conservative-minded Concert. Paul ...”

“... national psychodrama, and that they tend to be a displacement activity. It echoes the loftiness of Lord Reith, the first director-general of the BBC, with its whiff of paternalism; the ‘always’ implies the BBC’s permanence in the pantheon of British institutions.The BBC continues to rank alongside the NHS in the national imaginary, and is still the ...”

“... deal. A few years later an orphaned niece of Prasanna Rao’s caught tuberculosis. He brought her home with him from the village and she was admitted to hospital and recovered. But Maryamma caught the infection and died on 5 October 1941. This is what it meant for the children: ‘One afternoon, not long after, their father bathed them and dressed them up in ...”

“... ROME;/Let NERO’s Vices meet with NERO’s Doom,/And speed’ly call King JAMES from Exile Home.’ Cookson spent a winter in Newgate Prison.Using a loathed historical or literary figure as a stand-in for an unpopular contemporary one was a favourite trick of early modern writers who wanted to print sedition and get away with it (Cookson didn’t pull ...”

“... Britain spent vast sums ‘to torture one man abroad, while tens of thousands are starving at home to furnish the expense’. At first glance, the strain of British admiration for Napoleon seems the principal novelty of Semmel’s book. His broader contention that representations of the man served mainly as mirrors in which the British saw themselves is ...”

“... which pastiched the Gilbert and Sullivan aria ‘I’ve Got a Little List’, sung by the Lord High Executioner in The Mikado:There’s those who make up bogus claimsIn half a dozen names.And councillors who draw the doleTo run left-wing campaigns.They never would be missed,They never would be missed.Lilley and his civil servants thought disability ...”

“... was that he had made contacts among the youthful aristocracy, especially with the young Lord Westport, who could take him on free holidays. A visit to Ireland, in this company, produced an early example of a historically-informed, slightly perverse sentence: ‘As to the rebellion [of 1798] in Ireland, the English I think use the amplifying, and the ...”

“... to assuage his humane impulses. Some of Shaw’s humane impulses were exercised, by letter, on Lord Alfred Douglas. Shaw’s only meeting with Douglas was at the Café Royal on the fateful afternoon in 1895 when Frank Harris and Shaw tried to dissuade Oscar Wilde from the libel action he had set in train against Douglas’s father, the Marquess of ...”

“... which a young French couple travel to England, the land of advanced philosophy, only to hurry back home after near-fatal experiences with English riots, prisons, highway robberies and insane asylums, not to mention the dreadful cooking. ‘The only difference I see between the English and the savages of Africa is that the latter spare the fair ...”

“... of the top four conglomerates – chaebol, formed by analogy with ‘warlord’, means ‘cash-lord’ – are equivalent to over four-fifths of GDP. The two greatest disasters of modern Korean history created some of the conditions for all this. Japanese colonialism left behind a transport network and levels of literacy far above the regional ...”

“... the first two unsuccessful detonations of the dome: ‘Believers in the crowd let out that the Lord had heard their prayers and would not let the church be destroyed.’ ‘A third and final explosion dashed their hopes,’ Colton remarks.) (Those looking for a more charged, though necessarily imaginative account should read Ryszard Kapuściński’s ...”

“... of Sivrouka, Smith quickly incorporated him into the fantasy mise en scène as ‘her lord and master in the flesh’, showering him with caresses and ‘affectionate effusions’ in a weird pseudo-Sanskrit. Reliving scenes from her life as Marie Antoinette, Smith would flutter an imaginary fan, mimic taking snuff and throwing back a train, and ...”

“... This last is described by its publishers, Houghton Mifflin, as ‘the beautiful cornerstone of any home library’, and, given that the Shakespeare canon is only just short of a million words in length, the inadvertent suggestion that most of these books are hefty enough to be used as building blocks rather than just as reading matter isn’t far wide of the ...”

“... Weimar Republic he went out to practise in rural South Dakota. He later went east and found his home at Johns Hopkins University, where he established the first child psychiatry clinic in the US. He wrote the first English-language textbook of child psychiatry, which, in successive thick editions, became the standard. It drew heavily on existing German ...”

“... And how could she be expected to finish Mussolini’s The Cardinal’s Mistress (‘the Lord knows I tried’) or Forty Thousand Sublime and Beautiful Thoughts (‘conscientious though I be, I am but flesh and blood’)? When Dwight Macdonald identified ‘amiability’ as the distinctive quality of New Yorker criticism, he wasn’t thinking of ...”