“... rondo sense of closure’ and tells us that ‘the fortitude of the Prussian officer was held a deathless verity transcending validation’. Pardon me? He competes for our attention with the one whose historical actors are snazzed up and busted down, who clobber, zap and jimmy, show guts, play dumb, put the bite on, get their jollies and take it on ...”

“... bargained with this asset once too often and landed himself in an enterprise that can hardly have held serious botanical prospects. This was the ill-fated La Rochelle expedition, on which he doubled as baggage-master. He had entered the service of the Duke of Buckingham in connection with the planning of the garden of the latter’s new residence near ...”

“... just with the ends for which state power can be used, but with the way in which power is won and held: not just with the content of public policy, but with the way in which policy is made and implemented: not just with what governments do, but with what government is. To be sure, the ‘Attlee consensus’ had a constitutional dimension. Its adherents were ...”

“... sure of getting its measures through Parliament. But there is no guarantee that the factors which held Mr Benn back from 1974 to 1979 will still be in operation if another Labour government is returned to power in three or four years’ time, by a similar proportion of the electorate. For more than a century, British public servants have equated loyalty to ...”

“... myths. For Huitzilopochtli, a newcomer to the Mesoamerican pantheon peculiar to the Aztecs, was held to have sprung full-grown from the womb of Coatlicue, a fearsome earth goddess, engendered by a feather falling on her breast. His first act was to slay his half-sister Coyloxauhqui and her four hundred brothers on Mount Coatepec, the hill of the ...”

“... to describe the significance for queenship of an English coronation: the crowning meant the queen held a formal office and was not just the king’s wife; the anointing poured into her all the blessings of the Holy Spirit and made her queen by the grace of God, just as her husband was king; and the prayers invoked the fruitfulness of the biblical Sarah and ...”

“... dark days of 1917, there was general agreement that France must be defended. Was the cement that held the French together the union sacrée or the intellectual, spiritual and political leadership they were given? Some historians take the view that the stoicism of soldiers who concealed the realities of modern warfare from their friends and family insulated ...”

“... These are examples of what Gowing calls ‘the politics of touch’. In all of this women were held responsible for what had been done to them by men – in Holland, Pierre Bayle attacked this hypocrisy, and followed his own logic through to the point of defending abortion and infanticide. No 17th-century English man or woman seems to have had a comparable ...”

“... through every twist and turn of his chaotic presidency. On the Sunday before the election, he held rallies in Michigan, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida – a jet-fuelled version of the whistle-stop tour by which Harry Truman in 1948 demonstrated his political nerve against the favourite and eventual loser of that year, Thomas E. Dewey. The ...”

“... the three countries of England, Scotland and Ireland; those members of the titular baronetage who held land (and their children); and those squires whose landed property amounted to well over a thousand acres. This very capacious definition raises methodological problems, since, as he points out, in 1870 ‘the Duke of Omnium and the small squire were half a ...”

“... and they mattered especially during the 72-hour period that followed the UK-wide elections held on 6 May, during which results continued to trickle in. Labour was expected to lose the Hartlepool by-election, but the margin of its defeat, announced in the early hours, set the story of a ‘heartlands catastrophe’ rolling. Ben Houchen’s crushing ...”

“... such as Norman Stone, Hew Strachan, Annette Becker and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau. With Cataclysm, David Stevenson draws on much recent work to provide a comprehensive account of the war, with a welcome interest both in the non-European theatres and in the home fronts. His book is also part of a more general attempt to rethink the meaning of the Great War and ...”

“... his medical records were hacked, police officers were bribed for access to the details they held on him. The Sun in particular, under the editorship of Rebekah Brooks, made repeated intrusions into his private life in order to get him on the back foot. Brown calls it ‘a direct attempt to distort and suborn the policy of the government’. He accepts ...”

“... other novels and stories. Such children are at the centre of William Trevor’s tenth novel and David Profumo’s first; or rather, Trevor seems to have chosen to place young Tom both centrally and peripherally (as children often are, in fiction and in life), while Profumo makes young James the very eyes and ears of his book, though distancing him by ...”

“... Is there a British Marxism? David McLellan’s new book offers, implicitly, an answer. In his comprehensive survey of ‘Marxism after Marx’, one of the 24 chapters is devoted to British Marxism – and it is almost the shortest in the book. After a brief history of the British Left, he mentions the good work of some Marxist historians and economists ...”