“... or the British colonies in America who was spotted anywhere in Italy has been omitted, even if no more than his or her surname is known. The Mellon Centre’s researchers have trawled the British county record offices and the Archivio di Stato in every major Italian city. Hardly a minnow can have slipped through the net, though it has landed one ...”

“... their bread under the pain of a brand of the iron on their cheeks and banishment from the town.’ More than five hundred years later, sex-workers still trade in Aberdeen’s red-light district. Syphilis became less virulent as the years went by, although this had nothing to do with the efforts of the council; it was simply that the organism was evolving. Real ...”

“... and triple tall oriels rising dramatically from the steep slope of Scott Street, when, for more than a decade, I taught architectural history at the Mackintosh School of Architecture. I also had the privilege of being able to explore the interior of the School of Art at will. And I became more and ...”

“... the Venerable Bede, and its modern exponents include such engaging and stylish writers as Charles Thomas, Leslie Alcock and Henry Mayr-Harting. The literary sources have attracted much idiosyncratic talent, for they possess the fascination of a cryptic crossword in which one must sift fact from propaganda, post-Norman Conquest forgery from dimly glimpsed ...”

“... The history of Roman Britain has always been – perhaps predictably – more about Britain than about Rome. For those committed to our island story, the Romans, after all, are something of an embarrassment, as invaders and occupiers who brutally suppressed native independence movements. Even if conquest can be glossed with more comfortable ideas of civilisation, there is still the nagging problem of the Dark Ages: the inability of the British to maintain good order once the legions had been withdrawn ...”

“... John Gray declares that morality is a ‘myth’ obscuring the fact that our existence has ‘no more meaning than the life of a slime mould’. David Brooks, author of the bestselling pop-science Bildungsroman The Social Animal, explains that his fictional everywoman ‘Erica’ is slow to trust ‘Harold’ because ‘while Pleistocene men could pick their ...”

“... an even greater wish to involve the reader in a problem and its solving. It is, he says, a book more about questions than answers. It is certainly full of opinions. Rackham begins by defining and describing woodlands and the way they behave. They are not mere agglomerations of trees that can be planted: plantations can never in centuries truly replicate ...”

“... knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole ...”

“... Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, told James VI and I that what they enjoyed together was ‘more affection than between lovers in the best kind’. Lucy Hughes-Hallett wonders, in her biography of Buckingham, if chiefs of staff or special advisers can be understood as favourites, but really there is no modern equivalent. The royal favourite flourished ...”

“... of communicating with foreign states. He failed on both counts, and returned home with nothing more than a letter from the Qianlong emperor, translated to English, filled with grandiose stylings: ‘Our dynasty’s majestic virtue has penetrated unto every country under Heaven, and Kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. As ...”

“... is easily the most significant intellectual in politics these islands ever produced. Infinitely more profound and productive than his nearest 18th-century equivalent, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, he was also far more prominent in national politics over a much longer span than John Milton or the 3rd Earl of ...”

“... first, Larkin forged ahead, publishing two novels and a book of not-bad poems before Amis had done more than get his stuff into a few little magazines. Since a lot of their co-hating was directed at the premature career success of others, a certain cooling between them might have been expected at this point. But Amis, to his credit, rallied manfully. ‘I am ...”

“... many hours helping lost cyber-souls find digital salvation. In this particular space, there are more than two million contributors a year, with more than forty thousand making more than 36 annual contributions, and about eight hundred making contributions just about all the time. The ...”

“... these days publish a new collection of thirty or forty poems every three or four years; some are more industrious than even that. Paul Durcan’s Going home to Russia, coming two years after The Berlin Wall Café contains 48 poems; Peter Redgrove’s In the Hall of the Saurians, one year after its predecessor, has 34; Norman MacCaig’s Voice-over, three ...”

“... at once. In this sense, radical politics demand a strangely hybrid human being, one who is both more sceptical and more trustful than the average. Such characters are more gloomy in their view of the past and present than most conservatives, but also ...”