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“... household gadgets to practising law and medicine. Prominent Lebanese Americans like Ralph Nader, Michael DeBakey, William Peter Blatty, Senator James Abourezk and General John Abizaid rarely visited Lebanon itself. As attached as some were to their grandmothers’ cooking and to bits of folklore, they preferred to keep the country at a distance. Anthony ...”

“... involvement in a porno racket, and sometimes with a more serious resonance as in Geoffrey Hill’s poems on Offa. Mr Leyser matches Hill in the intensity of his meditation on the meaning of the past, a past whose remoteness Dr McKitterick’s conventional approach confirms. The paradoxical nature of Early Medieval ...”

“... the historian Lecky pronounced in 1892. And not long afterwards, Isaac Foot, the father of Michael and a firm Cromwellian, used to ‘judge a man by one thing: “Which side would he have liked his ancestors to fight on at Marston Moor?”’ Worden has no time for Postmodernism, the view that ‘the past exists only in the present’s head, and that ...”

“... In​ the 1950s, Western scholars and Chinese émigrés were writing extensively on the classical tradition in China, but historians in the People’s Republic were constrained by a Marxist framework that sorted the major thinkers of the past into ‘materialists’ (good) and ‘idealists’ (bad). This impasse lasted until Mao’s death in 1976, but classical scholarship continued to be neglected into the 1980s, as a flood of translations entered China and with them a vast body of Western thought ...”

“... left behind were that it should be used in any way possible – short of falling into the hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the ...”

“... accommodation above, with the lease belonging to Henrietta Roberts (later Dombey), the daughter of Michael Roberts and Janet Adam Smith. What occasioned Rupert’s interest was his having been to look at a very grand house for his magazine (World of Interiors), the expensive decoration of which included several Ben Nicholsons. This reminded me that over the ...”

“... who also included Nehru.* There is a wonderful photo of Gandhi in the Thompsons’ garden at Boars Hill in 1931: a photographer in a Calcutta studio might have unfurled a backdrop labelled ‘Britain: Home Counties’ and positioned the great man in front of it. It was on this visit that Gandhi told his host he would never say ‘farewell to India’ – the ...”

“... His own schooling is an important part of his political personality. He went to Kingham Hill School, a boarding school for disadvantaged children, and often speaks of his debt to it: ‘I owe more than I can possibly say, or ever repay, to Kingham Hill and to those who supported me while I was there.’ The point ...”

“... is about a United man on the run from the militia, and I tell him about Orr’s ‘Donegore Hill’, a brilliant, almost unknown political poem which describes the ‘unco throuither squath’ery’ – the hurrying disorganised crowd – that went into battle in 1798. In the evening we drive out to a moss – a bog – near Slemish, the mountain where ...”

“... been lodged in the Lambeth Workhouse with their mother, Hannah, before she was relocated to Cane Hill Lunatic Asylum in Surrey, where her inclination to launch into compulsive hymn singing was countered by a regime of ice-cold baths. Part of the workhouse was now the Cinema Museum. My companion, Anna Sinclair, was due to introduce a double bill of Henry ...”

“... start, so criticism has been slow to gather momentum. Even the recent spate of studies – by Michael Kirkham, Stan Smith, and the contributors to Jonathan Barker’s Art of Edward Thomas – seems more fortuitous than co-ordinated. Thomas, as Robert Frost reminded him, ‘knew the worth of [his] bays’. However, it is unwise to die in war when a ...”

“... Since then, a number of historians have tried their hand at the prosopography of the saints. Michael Goodich has attempted to draw ‘a profile of 13th-century sainthood’, André Vauchez has studied the later Middle Ages, and now two specialists in Italian history, Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell, have surveyed the whole of Western Christendom from ...”

“... Marx. He thought, like many militant Imperialists, that the cowardice of British troops at Majuba Hill had revealed the physical and moral degeneracy of the urban population. ‘The disgrace in itself is unspeakable.’ His literary experiments connected with attempts to regenerate the Imperial race by purifying its language, by conserving an essentially and ...”

“... Florence Nightingale. Yet Strachey himself seems less our contemporary now than he did when Michael Holroyd’s biography appeared in the late 1960s. Greeting the publication of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica in 1903, the young Strachey imagined that ‘the truth’ was ‘really now upon the march’ and that ‘the Age of Reason’ had dawned at ...”

“... Dickens, who held strong opinions about virtually everything, had his own view of such occasions. Michael Slater notes his ‘embarrassment’ and ‘irritation’ at the Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations of 1864: always for Dickens the best way for a writer or any other artist to be remembered was not through biographies, unless they redounded as much ...”