“... temptation to give this high romance a touch of the demotic: It was Christmas at Camelot – King Arthur’s court, where the great and the good of the land had gathered, all the righteous lords of the ranks of the Round Table quite properly carousing and revelling in pleasure. Compare O’Donoghue’s: It was Christmas at Camelot, and there was the king ...”

“... his efforts in securing democracy, freedom of speech and fairness was John Wilkes, the subject of Arthur Cash’s informative and enjoyable new biography. Now that ‘high politics’ is taught less and less in schools and universities, Wilkes’s great political achievements, which included lowering the tone of high politics, are less and less ...”

“... Troy and the composition of the Homeric epics, or between the supposed post-Roman context of King Arthur and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. In each of these three cases, serious scholars still try to make the legend fit the archaeology and turn it into history. See, for instance, Joachim Latacz’s Troia und Homer ...”

“... Autobiography is the zest with which she writes about her work. ‘I always took pleasure in a little bit of fine writing (afterwards called in the family language a “trot”) ... when I got moved by my subject, and began to feel my heart beat, and perhaps a little water in my eyes ... I have always had my ...”

“... history and Anglo-German relations – on which he is an authority – Rüger gives tantalisingly little space to the islanders themselves. There were a couple of thousand of them. At first they were fishing families; later, as the holidaymakers, poets, soldiers, sailors and spies of Northern Europe came pouring off the steamers, they became part-time ...”

“... When​ George H.W. Bush arrived in Washington as vice president in January 1981 he seemed little more than a sideshow to Ronald Reagan, the one-time leading man who had been overwhelmingly elected to the greatest stage in the world. Biography after inconclusive biography would be written about Reagan’s two terms, as their authors tried to square the many gaps in his knowledge with his seemingly acute political instincts and the ease with which he appeared to handle the presidency ...”

“... an outlet overseas for all the manly endeavour that would otherwise be unbearably cooped up in one little island. The effect of such novels lasted well into our own century: Graham Greene has written that the stories of Rider Haggard were responsible for his lifelong interest in Africa. But for most children today, James Stephen’s prophecy of a time when ...”

“... was the author of these novels, until I noticed a tiny credit on the title page: ‘Text by Robert Arthur’. I looked ‘text’ up in the dictionary to double-check it meant what I thought it did. It was disappointing to discover that Hitchcock himself hadn’t written any of these stories, but it didn’t stop me from wolfing them down.In the late ...”

“... ones Sondheim can hear without squirming. He went to Williams College in Massachusetts and acted a little: the part he craved was the young killer in Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall. He had to smoke for that role, and continued for decades. After graduating in 1950, he studied with Milton Babbitt. He may have been flirting with thoughts of classical ...”

“... In​ the summer of 1849, Arthur Hugh Clough went to dinner with the writer Jane Octavia Brookfield. ‘I tried to talk with him, but he has the most peculiar manner I almost ever saw,’ she wrote to Thackeray the following day. ‘Mr Clough sat at the foot of my sofa with this keen expression of investigation, which I determined not to mind, & only thought him un-understandable ...”

“... political history can easily seem highly specific, illuminating the past of one state but very little else. But to the extent that we are all blessed or burdened with families, bodies, rituals and class, the stuff of social history and, above all, of cultural history can appear much more widely interesting and relevant. By focusing their energies on these ...”

“... news of his romance with Jessica Lange, whom he was then partnering in Country, had just broken. Arthur Miller’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe had caught the headlines in the past, but to get the girl and join the top league of male box-office stars at the same time was a new story. There was much dissection of Shepard’s life-style, the subtleties of his ...”

“... has been saluted as part of the historian’s craft by many different figures from Karl Popper to Arthur Marwick. Yet in this matter as in others the English are not as tolerant as they would like to be thought. Marxist blooms in particular have been summarily attacked as weeds. The hot temper of so many responses to Edward Thompson’s The Making of the ...”

“... all pamphlets written in England by women in the 1650s were by Quakers. The sect had comparatively little respect for the old ways. To conservatives within the regime, this suggested that the toleration offered in Lambert’s 1653 constitution had gone too far. By late 1656, the Protectorate had reached a crisis. It had always struggled to unite disparate ...”

“... any close involvement with tennis. That’s only an impression gathered from the fact that very little of the actual life of the game appears in the book’s pages and from my disappointment that such a gifted writer gives so little of himself in a quasi-inert hotchpotch of selections from here and there. Except for an ...”