“... been the downfall of the Romans at Cannae. Very different men though they were, Marlborough and Charles XII, Napoleon and Wellington, shared the same dedicated professionalism and the same will to win. Charles of Sweden was in his own mad way the most remarkable of the lot, and the one who in the end did most damage to ...”

“... as early as 1607, and sporadic digging had taken place from 1689. But it was not till 1734, when Charles III of Naples became interested in the sites, that anything like serious investigation was begun, under the direction of an engineer from Spain, Rocco Gioacchino de Alcubierre. Alcubierre was interested only in treasure-hunting; eager only to find statues ...”

“... affected by it are likely to have been precisely those whose fathers were closest to the exiled Charles II, and who were therefore most likely to be catapulted to social prominence after 1660. Moreover, no amount of explaining Rochester’s personal circumstances will explain why he appears to have spoken to the condition of many of his contemporaries. It ...”

“... pervasive, if not cataclysmic resonances of war. The first serious study of 20th-century Britain, Charles Loch Mowat’s Britain between the Wars (1955), neatly managed, as the title indicates, to steer between the century’s two total wars. Liberal British historians found wars very nasty and preferred either to avoid them altogether or to keep them in ...”

“... institutions of female instruction which were founded in the latter half of the 19th century. Charles Kingsley, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of English at Queen’s College, London, argued that the reading of English would help towards an understanding of the ‘English spirit’ and would therefore counteract the notion that ‘the minds of ...”

“... He then settled in Paris, but his academic ambition was thwarted, and in the end he gave up hope of a professorship. He went back to Geneva and settled into a dull professional life in the provinces, teaching Sanskrit and comparative philology for twenty years to relatively few students. At the same time, however, he maintained a ...”

“... It was. The Deys of Algiers subsisted on the profits of slaving and piracy, and according to Charles-André Julien’s Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine (1964), the country was exploitatively ruled by a Turkish minority and the absolute power of the Dey depended on the military support of the Janissary regiment. ...”

“... doesn’t remember. Oscar Wilde, the Brontës, Robert Louis Stevenson, Tennyson, George MacDonald, Charles Reade, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, Conan Doyle, Du Maurier, and plenty more. Her literary memory is a compendium of every syllabus in Victorian literature that could be contrived. Alice is the woman in ...”

“... fairly close approximations, ascribing their discrepancies to ‘observational errors’. But, as Charles Sanders Peirce pointed out, this was simply a term of art: there was seldom any good reason to believe that there was anything wrong with the experiments. In his view, and in mine, the deviations were a matter of chance, and I follow him in taking chance ...”

“... as its poignant first words: ‘I am reaching an age when I had better collect the essays which I hope to preserve.’ There is the small accidental shock upon now meeting such innocent words as ‘She wanted to have no more bother,’ given that Empson came drily to relish as his own epitaph ‘No more bother.’ There is the resilience ...”

“... the field, she was sidelined and became impoverished. De la Beche painted Duria Antiquior in the hope of helping his friend out of her dire financial straits, and based the denizens of his ancient sea largely on the creatures whose remains she had uncovered in the fossil-rich limestone and shale of Lyme Regis. When the painting became a print, the image sold ...”

“... and has little of the sympathy for the past which is the best protector of future needs. We must hope this does not happen at the Tate. The Gallery’s imminent division may be an appropriate moment to review the prehistory of the type of institution, or rather types of institution, which it embodies. This means looking back, not a hundred years but two ...”

“... and hopeless; T.E. Smith, whose wife and daughter both had affairs with the maverick statesman Charles Dilke. As in a painting by Frith, here is a canvas crowded with figures, representing the rich diversity of Victorian life and manners. Through the riot of detail Macleod detects patterns. That is not easily done with so large and various a body of ...”

“... Star Chamber was not averse to having unauthorised new houses pulled down. In the 1630s, during Charles I’s ‘personal rule’, two developments occurred. The better-known one was the building of Covent Garden, the first London square, erected under royal licence to the designs of the royal architect, Inigo Jones, and soon to set the model for the style ...”

“... modern English history. Whether or not we call them ‘crises’, moments of heightened fear or hope invariably found poets in the front line of political agitation. In 1562-63, and again in 1579-81, there were the uncertainties over the succession and over Queen Elizabeth’s readiness, in addressing them, to put the nation’s interests before her own. In ...”