“... to lift the weapons of murder against our French and other brethren,’ she is reported to have said, ‘then we shall shout: “We will not do it.” ’ In this context, Luxemburg’s celebrated theory of the ‘Mass Strike’ must be understood as a strategy for paralysing the state at the moment of declaration of war. The SPD leadership lacked both her ...”

“... characteristic gesture.) However, he has to face up to the fact that he quite likes what Kissinger said. ‘Hardest of all, as one becomes older, is to accept that sapient remarks can be drawn from the most unwelcome or seemingly improbable sources, and that the apparently more trustworthy sources can lead one astray.’ So Schmitt can’t be entirely ...”

“... Ibn Bassām recorded a prophecy that had been circulating widely:A man once told me he heard it said … that once upon a time this Peninsula was conquered and taken away from a ruler named Rodrigo, and that another Rodrigo was one day destined to take it back – a prophecy that has filled all hearts with terror, and made men feel that what they feared and ...”

“... in women ‘a passion for a mysterious Race of black Enchanters: such as of old were said to creep into Houses, and lead captive silly Women’. It’s significant, in the history of East-West relations, that Shaftesbury could only understand the alien bogeys in terms of beliefs rather closer to home than Baghdad or Cairo.Another reason the work ...”

“... In the reign of Edward VI, an Exeter clergyman named William Herne, an enthusiast for the gospel, told one of the city’s aldermen that he would rather be torn apart by wild horses than ever again say the Catholic Mass. In December 1553, Queen Mary newly enthroned, the alderman entered his parish church to find Herne at the altar, in his old vestments and all ready to go ...”

“... were the ‘Tudor’ characteristics – those possessed in common by Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I? Ruthlessness? At first, that seems a promising answer. After all, even Edward VI before his premature death managed to exhibit his father’s notorious ‘frown’. Unfortunately, the ...”

“... not painful enough, the malign intelligence behind the plot had been the kaiser’s uncle, King Edward VII, who had died in 1910: This, in a nutshell, is the true, naked situation engineered so slowly and surely by Edward VII, elaborated and systematically expanded through covert talks with Paris and St Petersburg, and ...”

“... a nature a little lower than that of angels and assumed by far higher than they,’ according to Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759). In short, was Swift a monster, as Samuel Johnson nearly said: ‘The greatest difficulty that occurs, in analysing his character, is to discover by what depravity of ...”

“... Rich and eccentric, Edward Perry Warren was used to indulging his whims. After seeing Rodin’s The Kiss in 1900, he was determined to have a replica carved by the sculptor himself. It was to be exact in every respect except one. He asked Rodin to provide a full view of the nude man’s genitals. Four years later the piece was completed and delivered to its new owner ...”

“... Oxford Book of American Verse, Michael Holroyd’s Augustus John, Andrew Motion’s The Poetry of Edward Thomas (‘Am I to suppose this is how he talks to his students, poor sods?’). The fame of other writers Grigson takes as an affront: ‘a sudden fashion for Borges, a fashion for Beckett, a fashion for Bunting’. Imagine publishing in 1976 and ...”

“... who, in the novel, are only reported – Jimmy, the early lover of Dowell’s wife; the girl Edward Ashburnham kissed in a railway carriage – and makes people speak what Ford’s characters certainly would not have uttered – as when Florence says to Leonora of Dowell: ‘he wouldn’t take me when he could have done.’ He leaves out what Ford saw ...”

“... People​ said things about Karl, but not often to his face. He might like the things or he might not, and that did not always depend on whether they were intended as compliments or the opposite. Personal remarks could be returned with interest, hot or cold. Whichever way, he remembered them with accuracy.I can think of two personal remarks about Karl, in his early years, which reached him and went down well ...”

“... English products: ‘Truly, England is our garden of delights,’ Innocent is reported to have said, ‘an inexhaustible well from whose plenty many things may be extorted.’ (Paris went on to note that ‘the London merchants who dealt in these things were not displeased, and sold them at whatever price they chose.’) A detail from the Clare ...”

“... so. Perhaps the greatest of them, Reynold Bray, an abrasive, straight-talking midlander who it was said could ‘do anything’ with the king, went by plain ‘Mr Bray’. The greatest nobles in the land pledged him their loyalty and service – a collection of their correspondence to him, scrapingly obsequious, is held in Westminster Abbey – knowing that a ...”

“... from the superb Carolingian manuscript then in England and now in Utrecht, it should not have been said, without a word of warning, that they ‘presumably reflect Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical usage’. One can see what Professor Fell means when she dismisses the – potentially appalling – implications of the Anglo-Saxon penitentials, because it is true that ...”