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“... trauma, psychological numbing, amnesia, insomnia or other forms of automatic arousal. Readers of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon or Pat Barker should not be surprised that this description of PTSD turns out to have a strong resemblance to the description of shell-shock that has become part of the modern literary tradition: the psychiatrists are, after ...”

“... to be worth passing down to your heirs. Wealthy citizens became discerning collectors. The hall of Robert Stodley, a merchant who died in 1536, contained cupboards, tables, a desk, a bench, a counting table and a chair ‘of English oak [with] a woman’s face on the back’. The lower orders collected possessions too. John Elmesley can’t have earned much as ...”

“... in May 1940, as a result of the failed Norwegian campaign, his stock had sunk fairly low but, as Robert Self points out, he continued to serve in Churchill’s government to such good effect that the latter made no bones about saying that Chamberlain was ‘the best man’ he had, ‘head and shoulders over the average man in the administration’. Attlee ...”

“... figures of the past. King’s Mistress, Queen’s Servant (2007) was about Henrietta Howard, long-service mistress of George II, while Elizabeth’s Women: The Hidden Story of the Virgin Queen (2010) dealt with Elizabeth’s mother, sister and female competitors. Her co-authored history of royal weddings, The Ring and the Crown, came out somewhat ...”

“... propagated Scottish notions of liberty, improvement, politeness and sentimentality. Rather as Robert Darnton a generation ago diverted scholarly attention from the philosophes to the printers, engravers and booksellers of Paris in The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the ‘Encyclopédie’, so Sher looks through all that Scottish mind ...”

“... Church of Rome. He left Oxford, where Julia remained, went to London as an examiner for the Civil Service Commission, and finally returned to Dublin in 1882 as a fellow of the Royal University of Ireland, and died there in 1900. A stutterer, he was always ‘an anomaly, a walking category mistake’, as Bergonzi calls him. And the saddest thing is all that ...”

“... Panchikhin, the Head of Central Directorate at the Union, a confidential clerk gone grey in the service of duty who has long ago put aside any personal ambition. Usvatov knows what he owes to Panchikhin but he needs the job for his own son-in-law. Early retirement, then, for Panchikhin. Far from diminishing, however, the clerk expands, gains weight, and ...”

“... name – came to expire of a burst bladder in Prague is explained, along with much else, by John Robert Christianson. The centre of gravity of Tycho’s Island is Danish social history: in irresistible detail, Christianson interprets Tycho’s behaviour in the context of the customs and expectations of the Danish high aristocracy. Tycho’s island was ...”

“... the extent to which Child’s Play 3 provided in the figure of Chucky a fictional precedent for Robert Thompson and Jon Venables: not an inspiration to the children, but an explanation of what they had done. Child’s Play 3 wasn’t the only story offered to provide a context for the killing: Andrew O’Hagan’s Diary in the LRB (11 March 1993), for ...”

“... writing this I could/should be watching England’s World Cup game with Turkey live on my public service BBC TV. As it is, I will have to wait until 10.10 tonight to get the highlights. Between now and 10.10 tonight I will also have to not buy the Evening Standard, not watch the Nine O’Clock News and not pay my usual early-evening visit to the pub. All ...”

“... of panoptic logocrats? ‘Who whom?’ is famously a political as well as a linguistic question. Robert Burchfield in his deft and delightful book still hopes that it is possible to be a true liberal (that is, only wishy and not washy), so he says that ‘the formal distinction ... is breaking up but should be maintained where possible.’ (Would it really ...”

“... object. As he remarked one day, ‘It was an excellent question of my lady Cotton, when Sir Robert Cotton was magnifying of a shoe, which was Mose’s or Noah’s, and wondering at the strange shape and fashion of it: But Mr Cotton, says she, are you sure it is a shoe?’ The 20th-century art historian Martin Kemp has spent his life reconstructing the ...”

“... the quirky, oblique lyricism which has become his personal signature, he puts it here to the service of an idea, or complex of ideas, which constitutes a private poetry of departure. An ‘inner émigré’, in Seamus Heaney’s phrase, he proposes for himself, for his father, for a childhood neighbour, real or imagined disappearing acts. This is, from ...”

“... Jew’ (I throw in a further story here, to the effect that at his funeral or synagogue memorial service an earwitness friend of mine heard two old Oxford panjandrums agree that the service had gone well – ‘but what was all that Jewish stuff about?’). Then again, there is the lecture at which a student is vexed to ...”

“... with military and civilian recruitment. The younger brother was appointed Director of National Service, a political post but with no Parliamentary seat in December 1916. In this position, with no experience of Whitehall, no political standing and no direct access to the Cabinet, Chamberlain found himself caught in the cross-fire of a fierce power struggle ...”