“... of Shrewsbury should have given such sound pastoral advice to the founders of Private Eye, Richard Ingrams and his gang of merry chums: these old boys have shamed their old school, making it a byword. Shrewsbury, as Simon Raven notes, is now notorious for shrewishness. Grand old school-stories have furnished Raven with many quotes and ...”

“... Richard Evans hopes that this book will take the place of E.H. Carr’s What is History? and G.R. Elton’s The Practice of History as the ‘basic introduction’ to history as taught in the universities. Evans is a self-declared ‘Rankean’ empiricist, committed to Ranke’s view that facts and documents ‘speak for themselves ...”

“... Descriptions​ of Richard Titmuss often drew on the language of otherworldliness. He was ‘the high priest of the welfare state’ according to an assessment quoted in the ODNB. His entry there considers, though judiciously rejects, his frequent characterisation as a ‘saint’; understandably, it doesn’t cite his LSE colleague Michael Oakeshott’s description of him as ‘a snake in saint’s clothing ...”

“... decency but a devastating political blunder, which alienated moderate opinion and inoculated the English nation against Catholicism for ever. Marian apologists and polemicists were dismissed as uncharismatic second-raters, the regime in general as fatally unaware of the crucial importance of argument and debate in the battle for hearts and minds, and thus ...”

“... In the course of the agitation against the Corn Laws in the early 1840s, the movement’s leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free trade. But Wilson had no intention of being a mouthpiece for the Anti-Corn Law ...”

“... Just doing their job. There aren’t too many significant resemblances between Pynchon and Richard Powers – Powers’s imagination is deeply invested in the local and in Pynchon the local is always about to become something else – but the passage about the Line and the Good finds an interesting and no doubt unintended commentary in The Echo ...”

“... The Quattro Cento, now reissued along with it – would establish Stokes as a respected voice in English art-writing until his death forty years later. Stones of Rimini is decidedly the more compelling performance. Its opening lines step forward with a cool swagger, toying with Virgilian cadences: ‘I write of stone. I write of Italy where stone is ...”

“... Oscars) is in this sense the ideal Goldcrest film: classy, thoughtful, historical and English (even Ghandi was one of us). It had no ‘sex or gratuitous violence’, Jake Eberts says, and it appealed ‘to all age groups and audiences’. ‘In our view,’ Eberts continues, ‘it was like Gone with the Wind.’ Only ...”

“... many historians, including both Dr Sharpe and myself, were moving away from the Whig picture of English history in which Charles and his regime appeared simply as a roadblock on the way to the future. Familiar evidence, on rereading, came to have a very different appearance from that previously credited to it. Dr Sharpe has carried this process further than ...”

“... semiotics and deconstruction. We have had analyses of his work by Charles Mauron, Jean-Pierre Richard, Robert Greer Cohn, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Leo Bersani, Malcolm Bowie and others. It might seem surprising, therefore, not to find a single full-length biography published between Henri Mondor’s 1941 Vie de Mallarmé and Gordon ...”

“... restored Bourbons had become archivist of the police records of Paris and hence a benefactor of Richard Cobb and readers of his Death in Paris (1978). The records of suicide caught Peuchet’s eye, and he had a line on it. The line was to defend suicides against the customary condemnation by claiming, like Thomas Hood in ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, that ...”

“... exactly – and get it right.’ But, she says, ‘for the modern British – more to the point, English – novelist, this notion of truth is a little obscured and inaccessible.’ Historical novels and ‘books on “important” subjects’ are popular because they allow readers and writers to ‘evade the question’ of lived experience: What we do not ...”

“... of King James VI and I. By 1605-8, the likely date of Timon, the Scottish king had been on the English throne for several years, and a pattern had been established. He bought the loyalty of the nobility and the affection of handsome young men with jewels, gold vessels and the like. The surplus left by Elizabeth turned into a deficit of £600,000, an ...”

“... own Plantagenet relations. She is the daughter of a duke and the niece of two kings, Edward IV and Richard III. On her wrist, emblematic, is a small barrel. Her father was Shakespeare’s ‘false, fleeting, perjured Clarence’, who died in the Tower of London at the age of 29, attainted for treason and supposedly drowned in a butt of malmsey. The ...”

“... In 1950 a venerable, once highly successful, long-ailing magazine quietly expired. Richard Usborne, the assistant editor in its dying days, later recalled an aficionado’s touching reaction. ‘When the Strand finally folded in 1950, my old sixth-form master wrote to me regretfully: “I loved the dear old Strand ...”