“... as ‘the constitutional historian’, and this is a reminder that that is what he is, but even more he is the historian of the Tudor court, real politics rather than the constitution. No one is better qualified to tell the story of Elizabeth’s first 25 years, which are given cursory treatment in many earlier biographies. They were allowed only 45 pages ...”

“... own election that silences, or ought to silence, any post-Movement tendency to scoff. Like Dylan Thomas, like Graves, Heaney assumed the noble vestments, but he did so with an engaging awkwardness, a persuasive lack of flourish. One of the fascinations of Heaney’s work, read from the beginning until now, is in observing how he shifts this way and that to ...”

“... under a frosty blue-black pressure. In this type of criticism, the reading process becomes more than analogous to the act of writing: reading fuses with writing because it empathises in a dramatic manner with the critic’s struggle to express ideas, a struggle that resembles an actor’s total expressiveness in relation to an audience. Such writing is ...”

“... By the end of summer, hope was lost: the Venetian ambassador wrote that Mary’s pregnancy was more likely to ‘end in wind rather than anything else’. Another source claimed that she had given birth to a monkey.Anthonis Mor’s portrait from 1554 depicts Mary in the throes of this phantom pregnancy, shortly after her marriage to Philip II. The queen is ...”

“... wouldn’t a working girl like Sugar wear the ‘free trade’ variety? Sadleir would have been more knowledgable about Victorian knickers. In the critical afterword to The Quincunx, his 1989 attempt at a neo-Victorian novel, Charles Palliser says that the main ingredient of the recipe is ‘inversion’. Take Jane Eyre, turn it upside down, shake well and ...”

“... ignored, neglected, marginalised’ in France in spite of the Loi Taubira. The French transported more than 1.1 million Africans to the New World, about an eighth of the total traffic. The three French Caribbean colonies (Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue) took in as many slaves as all of Spanish America, and Martinique alone imported ...”

“... the video is interesting, or why it was shared around the world and viewed millions of times. The more I try to describe why it was compelling the worse it sounds. You had to be there.Patricia Lockwood is blunt about the difficulty of transposing the internet into literature: ‘All writing about the portal so far had a strong whiff of old white intellectuals ...”

“... the Lebanese civil war, Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. Today, Paris looks more and more like the Beirut of Western Europe, a city of incendiary ethnic tension, hostage-taking and suicide bombs. Parisians have returned to the streets, and to their cafés, with the same commitment to normality that the ...”

“... owning slaves and investing in those who do.So Barclay’s record on slavery was mixed. He spent more than a decade discouraging Quaker activists in North America such as Anthony Benezet from bothering the British government with proposals to ban the slave trade, and led the 1783 Quaker campaign to Parliament only after he realised that anti-slavery ...”

“... That wasn’t the last’s real name, which neither my aunt nor I could remember. It was really no more than a big room above the Co-op store, near the roundabout on Admiralty Road. On the way home from the pictures – the Rosyth Palace, maybe having seen there a naval epic such as The Cruel Sea or Above Us the Waves – I sometimes stood at the bus stop ...”

“... lunchtime when the IRA used an outsider to deliver explosives to a fish shop on the Shankill. Thomas Begley, who blew up 11 people including himself, had seldom ventured from his Nationalist neighbourhood in his 23 years. And he probably wouldn’t have got as far as he did if he hadn’t been smocked and gloved to look like someone who was in his element ...”

“... of the respect which was paid to the priest’. The longings of a Numa manqué were only part of a more disturbing fantasy, for a murderous ethnic tribalism stalked the groves of Ferguson’s beloved antiquity. Ferguson’s vision of communal solidarity anticipates aspects of Etzioni’s apocalyptic nightmare. Etzioni is troubled by the cheapness of life in an ...”

“... from the hold; 15 men of the frigate Blanche died of rum on the coast of France, leaving their more fortunate mates to be locked up for seven years, until Napoleon’s fall. There were worse forms of captivity than internment. Sailors of the 44-gun Resistance, lost off Sumatra, were seized by pirates and sold as slaves to a sultan, fetching various sums in ...”

“... intellectuals for his father’s return turned the ambivalence Klaus had always felt towards Thomas Mann into alienation. When Klaus committed suicide in Cannes in May 1949, it was left to his sister Erika to spell out the meaning of the Suicide Club described in his unfinished novel. She told American audiences that the deaths of Virginia Woolf, Stefan ...”

“... I remember thinking that the official US response was rather subdued. What if the victim had been Thomas Friedman of the New York Times? Would Pervez Musharraf have been able to describe Friedman at a Washington press conference as ‘too intrusive’, which is what he said about Pearl? It was as if Pearl had connived in his own murder. The brother of ...”