“... four flats and three garages in Canterbury, two properties in the nearby village of Charing, two more in South-East London and a holiday home in North Wales, where Nowell and their two daughters had taken refuge during the war. He also possessed a nicely spread portfolio, which included holdings not only in Johnson’s Wire Works but in Lonrho, not yet ...”

“... Casual’, who was in reality the journalist James Greenwood, then went home for a second, more restorative, hot bath. On 12 January, the first of three articles detailing his experience appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette under the title ‘A Night in a Workhouse’. Seth Koven opens his rich and absorbing study of Victorian ...”

“... Beaufoy, later a militia colonel and distinguished astronomer, admitted to wearing little more than the equivalent of a pair of pyjamas. The wars with Revolutionary France discouraged Alpinism, but by Byron’s day the flow of English visitors, whether climbers or sightseers, was in his view insupportable; they were fit company for the Swiss, ‘a ...”

“... It comes as a surprise, then, to learn of Henry’s sociable and venturesome youth. His father, Thomas Gosse, was an unsuccessful miniaturist, who made a shaky living by wandering the country and producing portraits on demand. His outspoken wife, Hannah, formerly a lady’s maid, was the real hub of the family. She was determined to educate her sons ...”

“... it, condemned Edward as ‘ambitious, unscrupulous, selfish, extravagant and ostentatious’. In more recent times, historians have continued to enter reservations. ‘He practised appeasement at home to pursue war abroad’ is a judgment undergraduates are frequently asked to address. Thus Edward has been seen as careless of the rights of the Crown, too ...”

“... Stone was born in August 1937, nine months after Don DeLillo and three – we’re told – after Thomas Pynchon. Dog Soldiers, his second novel, made his name in the mid-1970s, and since then he has stubbornly held his ground on the upper slopes of American literary life. Fellowships, prizes, grants and commissions have rarely been in short supply, and his ...”

“... As a student at St Thomas’s Hospital, I used to walk the long ‘Nightingale’ wards – Florence Nightingale had not only founded its school of nursing but was influential in the design of the building – and learned to avoid prayer-time because the way out was obstructed by the line of ‘Nightingales’ kneeling at the door in order of seniority ...”

“... and Wales alone, around 86,000 men died in combat and at least 100,000 from war-related diseases. More people perished, as a proportion of the population, than in the First World War. Nearly every town and hamlet was affected. Faringdon in Oxfordshire was reduced to ‘ashes and rubbage’: 236 families lost their homes there. The church survived, minus its ...”

“... left in Spanish America to be claimed. Hoping that their violent break with Spain would lead to a more harmonious world, they argued that accepting fixed borders (which corresponded to colonial administrative divisions) would prevent conflict and help to establish a moral community of bounded nations. 4. Throughout the 19th century, the ideological commitment ...”

“... the Islamic Republic, in spite of its often brutal authoritarianism, and which has been fed for more than half a century by American threats and humiliation, ever since the CIA-­­backed coup against Mossadegh in 1953.The same nationalism and pride that brought about the fall of the shah have in recent years been directed against the Islamic Republic ...”

“... in European cities, in the hope that writing up their sexual histories would help make lesbianism more accepted. When she couldn’t find a publisher for her research, a panel of medical experts, the Committee for the Study of Sex Variants, was formed, with a view to giving the project institutional authority. But according to the version of the story ...”

“... an indication of the depths to which the Argentine Air Force would stoop. Here we have one of the more notable examples of media hypocrisy during the conflict. The RAF does not employ napalm for the reason that it has available more sophisticated anti-personnel weapons. The Hunting BL755 cluster bomb is the prime ...”

“... and, despite all the limiting judgments, it includes Benjamin Britten. At a time when there was more interest than there is now in deciding what genius was, and what a genius was, Fichte argued that ‘where genius is really present, there industry is found spontaneously, and develops with a steady growth ... where industry is not to be found, then it is ...”

“... he also wrote a good deal of poetry, but his poems lack the magic of his equations, which seem more beautiful and moving now than when they were imagined 150 years ago. His abstract and ‘useless reformulation of Newton’s equations of motion was taken up a century later by Heisenberg and Schrödinger and fashioned into the central formalism of quantum ...”

“... and raped in London, ‘Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.’ All that day, and many days more, no doubt. But then presumably, since the girl later talked calmly enough to Mayhew, the drawer gradually closed, the glint of the knives softened, and life continued. Slums, years, have buried you. I would not dare Console you if I could. If the girl had ...”