“... some were struck by seeing the names of friends or, on a repeat visit, their own earlier entries. Robert Pike took the opportunity to mention that he was ‘from London’ and a ‘patent self-adjusting truss manufacturer and merchant’.The book is a rare survival that brings us close to contemporary experience, but its scope is necessarily ...”

“... On its inside wall was a hand-painted scroll featuring the famous couplet from ‘To a Louse’ by Robert Burns: ‘O wad some power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us.’The documents Barr and Painter rescued from the Broadway are now in the Moving Image Archive in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall, once the home of the city’s annual carnival and ...”

“... For​ the late French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Thomas Robert Malthus was an indispensable guide to the agrarian past. Le Roy Ladurie applied Malthus’s argument that population grows faster than subsistence to the archives of Languedoc, where, in the empirical detail of parish registers, cadastral surveys, tax rolls and price series, he perceived ‘the immense respiration of a social structure’ over the course of three centuries ...”

“... Ashburnham held the many rare manuscripts that had been donated to the nation by the antiquarian Robert Cotton, as well as the treasures of the royal manuscript collections. The flames from a fireplace had caught on the wooden mantelpiece and spread to the wainscoting. Hapless librarians were throwing water on the blaze; the city fire engines were nowhere to ...”

“... spears at the British. Individual British deaths were taken very seriously. After Lieutenant Robert Grenfell was hacked to death during the cavalry charge at Omdurman, his brother’s angry account of it spurred the men inspecting the wasted battlefield to ‘polish off the wounded and dangerous Dervishes with their bayonets in a very determined ...”

“... eccentric but deeply experienced traveller. Also in the English party was the embassy chaplain, a young man called Edward Terry. Years later, Terry published a memoir of his Indian travels, and this obscure volume – A Voyage to East India (1655) – contains almost the only information we have about Coryate’s last months. Coryate was by then in his early ...”

“... into popular use through officialdom – “safari” reports were a regular part of a young Assistant Commissioner’s paperwork – so that by 1905 or so it was colloquial in tiny Nairobi but unknown in London.’ The word became world-famous after 1908 when Teddy Roosevelt, relinquishing his Presidency, decided to hunt in East Africa and put his ...”

“... which the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has ignored. Instead, he is eager to approve a young ultra-right protégé of his, previously rated ‘not qualified’ by the American Bar Association, as a lifetime judge. Although the majority of the one hundred senators are elderly and at risk in such a large gathering, the Capitol’s attending physician ...”

“... President of Ireland, a position in which he served two seven-year terms. Duffy was the son of Young Irelander Charles Gavan Duffy, who was arrested for sedition on the eve of the 1848 Rebellion, but not convicted. In 1855, disappointed with the progress of the Tenants’ Right Party, which he had founded and represented at Westminster, Charles Gavan ...”

“... in what a standard account calls one of the most romantic episodes in the history of medicine, the young man was taken from the woods to New York, where for decades his doctor could watch exactly what went on in his stomach when he ate. Some of this is real ‘north face of the Eiger’ stuff. Jesse Lazear let a mosquito bite a yellow-fever victim and then ...”

“... a matter of months before the Corbett-Ashley case by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Robert Stoller, who proposed the distinction in his 1968 study, Sex and Gender – the second volume was called The Transsexual Experiment. For Stoller, gender was identity, sex was genital pleasure, and humans would always give priority to the first (many ...”

“... authored by distinguished-looking foreign gentlemen – Nabokov, Calvino – rather than a scruffy young lady in a combat jacket with a curly Jimi Hendrix crop. But the world caught up with her in the 1970s with the spread of women’s liberation and the founding in Britain of the feminist Virago Press. Carter was one of the first authors Virago recruited to ...”

“... you had sex with a girl or with a boy. The problem is to know if the partner was rich or poor, young or old, slave or free, married or not. Of course, Artemidorus takes into account the question of the sexual act, but he sees it only from the point of view of the male. The only act he knows or recognises as sexual is penetration. Penetration is for him not ...”

“... this by ensuring that the city’s first secretary was always an Azerbaijani.When he was young, most of his friends and neighbours were Armenian, as were the other boys in his football team. The city had three high schools, all close together: Armenian, Russian and Azerbaijani. He went to the Azerbaijani school, but students from all three would ...”

“... Seventies an organisation called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay life, though often ...”