“... been raining​ and the scent of jasmine hung over Moray Place. Most of the windows were dark and a notion of privacy seemed embedded in the stone. It must have been close to half past ten, because there was a sudden burst of fireworks over Edinburgh Castle – a nightly feast in August ...”

“... For a time, early last year, there was no trace of Robespierre to be found on the street where he lived in the days of his fame. The restaurant called Le Robespierre had closed its doors, and after a while its portrait sign was removed from above the entrance of the house on the rue Saint-Honoré ...”

“... fifty years after her death, those who are interested in her are very much interested. There are at least two collections of her papers which nobody is given permission to see – not quite with the feeling that she ought to be left to rest in peace, but, rather, that she shouldn’t be shared indiscriminately with outsiders. She was ...”

“... Untold Story of the Krays’ Reign of Terror, admits that Ronnie Kray did shock him. Just once. An unforgettable occasion. A motor eased alongside Tony at the corner of Blythe Street, Bethnal Green. Ron and Reg were inside, keeping company with a ...”

“... When Asa Briggs​ got a job at the University of Leeds, he and his wife bought what he considered an ‘imposing’ villa on the outskirts of the city. Waspishly, the historian A.J.P. Taylor described it as ‘like Asa himself, small, squat and full of Victorian bric-à-brac ...”

“... Act Three, Scene Three of Julius Caesar ends with the murder of a poet. It begins with a stage direction: Enter Cinna the poet, and after him the Plebeians. This direction creates two oppositions. The poet is opposed to the plebeians. And ‘Cinna the poet’ is opposed to ‘Cinna the conspirator’, a character with the same name but a different vocation ...”

“... to make your flesh creep,’ said the fat boy, and that is what the parties set out to do in 1987. As Rodney Tyler’s book shows, the key decision in the Conservative camp, on which all their three great warlords agreed – Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Lord Young – as did their retinues of ...”

“... Tim Binding is a confident writer. His paragraphs, lengthy but under control, take swift possession of the thick sheaf of pages, imposing form. The narrative voice is modestly assertive. There is a tale to be told. The taleteller, having caught your attention, will not let go. No tricks, no mannerisms, no eye-catching Modernist flourishes: that’s the trick of it ...”

“... Early in 1982, at the nadir of the fortunes of the first Thatcher government, a number of ministers sought to identify the causes of the riots that had erupted in British cities the previous summer. On 27 March, the prime minister herself blamed events in Brixton and Toxteth not on economic or political forces but on a decade ...”

“... neoliberalism. But for historians, nothing beats the gerund: the verb made noun, process as subject – this is what we do. Think of all the book titles beginning with ‘producing’, ‘imagining’, ‘forging’ or ‘inventing’, not to mention ‘reproducing’, ‘reimagining’, ‘recasting’ and ‘reinventing’. But the ultimate gerund ...”

“... Cook’s jokes, several times quoted in his obituaries, is of two men chatting. ‘I’m writing a novel,’ says one, whereupon the other says: ‘Yes, neither am I.’ And of course it’s funny and has a point, except that Peter, I suspect, felt that this disposed of the matter ...”

“... This biography opens with a vivid chapter on Raymond Williams’s funeral. Entitled ‘Prologue, in Memoriam’, it transports the reader to Clodock Church, ‘a plain little building’ in the foothills of the Black Mountains. It is a comfortless day, Fred Inglis tells us ...”

“... not be one of them. Thatcherism, if it is to survive, needs to reconstruct our sense of history so as to legitimate itself. Its opponents must struggle towards a better understanding of how Thatcherism became possible. The battle is swung in their favour by the paradox that Thatcherism threatens to destroy the very feeling ...”

“... of 1898-1904. More than 85 per cent are published from manuscripts or from facsimiles. Only about a hundred are completely new, but many hundreds are published entire for the first time. McGann’s edition of the poetry also contains some poems which were previously either unknown or not identified as Byron’s. But its ...”

“... In the great quilted cento that is Moby-Dick, there is a passage which might be interpreted as Melville’s response to James Barry’s 1776 engraving The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom. In the engraving Andrew Marvell is depicted with Milton, Locke and Algernon Sidney among the mourners at the bier of Britain’s traditional liberties ...”