“... gigantic scheme to plough up the steppe (43 million hectares of it eventually, mostly in north Kazakhstan) and plant it with grain crops. Leonid Ilyich was in his element there, driving or flying up and down his enormous fief, urging his staff to get out of the office and into the field, fighting to improve the wretched conditions of the hundreds of ...”

“... more or less the practice of editors ever since. The six drafts were, however, printed together in John Murray’s edition of 1896, and Womersley has taken the lead in insisting that this is the source the student of Gibbon must use. He is right; but Murray’s volume has never been reprinted, and we need a new edition, whether electronic or ...”

“... in the company of a steady companion called Hucks, picturesquely intent on a walking tour of North Wales. Their route took them through Oxford, where they looked up one of Coleridge’s old schoolmates, who took the visitors to see a notorious democrat at Balliol called Robert Southey. It was an encounter that, Southey would recall, ‘fixed the future ...”

“... of this system approached a kind of apartheid, as in the notorious ‘Cutteslowe Walls’ in North Oxford, seven feet high and topped off with iron spikes, built in the 1930s but still standing 20 years later, for the purpose of separating a middle-class suburban enclave from the neighbouring working-class housing estate. But the need for hierarchy seems ...”

“... on Germany in 1990, Trevor-Roper faced her down and tore her arguments to pieces. The historian John Habakkuk was an editor of Economic History Review in 1952 when Trevor-Roper’s onslaught against R.H. Tawney landed on his desk. He mused: ‘I find it difficult to decide whether T-R is a fundamentally nice person in the grip of a prose style in which it ...”

“... sampler of the high life. In both roles he fitted right in: he was, in his own words, John Bunyan’s ‘Mr Facing-both-ways’. He is intensely, almost insanely sociable. He discovered at an early age that being able to perform as a public speaker meant that ‘you need never dine or sleep alone.’ Early on, he mainly chose to sleep with boys ...”

“... bedtime stories by the nuns: Joan of Arc was like the young saints Perpetua and Felicity in Roman North Africa who faced the wild beasts in the arena, and her torments recalled the sadistic horrors which any number of martyrs in the Golden Legend undergo before they are finally dispatched by their executioners. The parallels between Joan’s sufferings and ...”

“... signified the maturity of Henry’s power, his dynastic grip. The last earl of Lincoln had been John de la Pole, the Yorkist claimant to the throne, killed fighting Henry VII at the battle of Stoke in 1487. His younger brother, Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, was executed in 1513; his brother William was securely shut in the Tower; another ...”

“... God was at work in the war, he must have sent its sufferings as a punishment to both sides – the North for its connivance at oppression and the South for its active extension of the evils of slavery. And this is the note struck by Niebuhr in the peroration of his book. Near the start of the Cold War, the message he believes most worth sending to the rulers ...”

“... theory, De Republica (c.54-51 BCE). The Roman general Scipio Aemilianus, who has arrived in North Africa for the third and final round of the Punic Wars, is visited in a dream by the spirit of his grandfather Scipio Africanus, victor of the second Punic War. The elder Scipio transports his grandson to a ‘high starry place’, prophesies his victory ...”

“... is the closest thing we have to a national industry. King Charles is a private landlord. John Lewis is a private landlord. The homelessness charity St Mungo’s is a private landlord. So are many MPs and, as Ruby found out, doctors.Landlordism has proliferated in tandem with soaring land and property values. A fifth of British homes are currently ...”

“... such as Rob Roy’s Frank Osbaldistone who undertake perilous expeditions into the wild regions north of the border. These young men turn out to possess a combative streak perfectly calibrated to rub the locals up the wrong way. So we shouldn’t be surprised that what most appeals to Lockwood about Heathcliff is the startling lack of warmth in his ...”

“... a point. It was across from what would become the new St Patrick’s Cathedral. The archbishop, John Joseph Hughes, had intended to buy the land for his own residence but was outbid by Restell – payback for his denunciation of her from the pulpit. In revenge, Wright says, she built ‘a house so ostentatious that parishioners at St Patrick’s would be ...”

“... set out in 1767 on a series of journeys through the country. A Six Months’ Tour through the North of England gives a spirited first-person account of changing agricultural conditions. ‘Agriculture is the grand product that supports the people,’ he wrote, ‘both public and private wealth can only arise from three sources, agriculture, manufactures ...”

“... said yes: ‘He did resist the assault force. And he was killed in a firefight.’ The next day John Brennan, then Obama’s senior adviser for counterterrorism, had the task of talking up Obama’s valour while trying to smooth over the misstatements in his speech. He provided a more detailed but equally misleading account of the raid and its ...”