“... on its spindly undercarriage. It was quicker on the ground than other airliners, just as it took off and landed faster than them. In all its movements, Trubshaw and his colleagues and their French counterparts had learned to expect an element of hurtle, exhilarating to master. Events came at a Concorde pilot at a more adrenalised tempo. Trubshaw liked ...”

“... of life on the throne. Grigory Danilovich, the hopelessly mediocre ‘military governor’ who took charge of Nicky’s education when the boy turned ten, is said to have told the tsarevich that he would learn all he needed to know from the ‘mysterious forces’ released by the ‘sacrament of taking the oath on the day of the coronation’. After 12 ...”

“... so sparingly, cherry-picking from already known and accessible texts. But this soon changed. John Burnett used annotated extracts to illustrate various aspects of working-class life in Useful Toil and Destiny Obscure. By 1981, David Vincent had found 142 memoirs spanning the years from 1790 to 1850, and in Bread, Knowledge and Freedom used them to ...”

“... being negotiated with France, reignited the wrath of the North Briton’s flamboyant co-editor John Wilkes and his backers in the City, prompting the publication of another withering issue, number 45. The new prime minister, George Grenville, and his secretary of state, Lord Halifax, decided it was time to put a stop to this constant assault on government ...”

“... a ship called the Zembla). McGuire’s opening sentence is an ironic allusion to John’s gospel – ‘Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man’ – but it also recalls the beginning of the novel that The North Water most resembles, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood ...”

“... campaign finance and one of his last votes was cast to undermine unions.Justice Brett Kavanaugh took Kennedy’s seat after a particularly acrimonious confirmation session, in which the nominee faced credible allegations of sexual assault. The political centre of the court now shifted from Kennedy to the chief justice, ...”

“... Only A Vindication of the Rights of Woman could be readily bought, in an Everyman, bound up with John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women. In a second-hand shop I found a 1906 edition of her Original Stories (for children), with an introduction by E.V. Lucas and five of the Blake plates reproduced. The other modern edition I acquired was called The ...”

“... are quite explicit about sex. There is a good deal of masturbation, a dress stained with semen (John Gilbert’s), lesbian couplings, Stokowski failing to make it, Churchill groping and salivating on the Onassis yacht, and a total disavowal of the famous interlude with Cecil Beaton. If Gronowicz’s transcriptions are to be believed, Greta Garbo kept no ...”

“... player not to contribute to Michael Charlton’s study, let it get buried. The Defence Secretary, John Nott, here speaks for the collective. ‘The Falkland Islands did not interest me,’ he tells Charlton. ‘I don’t think I would have really spent a lot of time mugging up my brief on matters surrounding the Falklands. I did not consider it to be of any ...”

“... sent to Lewes by his literary friends on receiving copies of his clearly lamentable novels. John Stuart Mill wrote explaining that he needed to read the book through a second time before making his comments, though meanwhile he liked it ‘on the whole decidedly better than I expected from your own account of it’, Bulwer Lytton pronounced: ‘You have ...”

“... occasion for a formal portrait. We hear of the florid complexions and the addiction to alcohol of John George of Saxony and Christian IV of Denmark, of the ‘mouse-coloured hair’ and shrill voice of the Elector Maximilian of Bavaria, of the habitual kneeling and hunting of the Emperor Ferdinand II, of the royal bearing of Gustav Adolf of Sweden, and the ...”

“... Saussure, who died in 1913 at the age of 55, sowed the seeds of structuralist thought that first took root in linguistics, then effloresced throughout the 20th century in fields as seemingly distinct as literary criticism, architecture, social anthropology and psychoanalysis. Yet, as John Joseph’s biography ...”

“... young Palestinians’ favourite throwing stone: ‘During the first intifada the young ones who took on the Israeli military with chert became known as the “children of the stones”.’ ‘Elterwater, 12 August 1786’ by Francis Towne This chapter shows Macfarlane’s method at its cleanest and most uncluttered; here he does not interrupt himself ...”

“... and things that may not be done by the rule of law may be done by the rule of government.’ It took the rest of the 17th century – a civil war, the king’s execution, the implosion of the republic, the restoration of the monarchy and the parliamentary coup d’état we know as the Glorious Revolution – to establish that government enjoyed no such ...”

“... feral figures became our familiar louche aristocrats and sapphic seductresses, most notably in John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (the other story written during that famous summer on Lake Geneva in 1816), Keats’s ‘Lamia’, Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ and Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Groom calls Dracula a ‘brilliant culmination’ and ...”