“... and local archives and working under the Jacobin historian Georges Lefebvre at the Sorbonne. He took up his first lectureship only in 1955, at Aberystwyth (which thereafter loomed largest in his extensive demonology of provincial Britain), and after a year in Leeds in the early 1960s he moved to Oxford, spending a decade as a tutorial fellow at Balliol and ...”

“... equipment needed to make a firm diagnosis. At the Nuova Clinica Latina, a prototype PET scanner took cross-sectional images of my brain that revealed a fracture in the lower left rear (parieto-occipital) region of my skull. The X-rays didn’t show any bone splinters round the edge of the fracture, indicating that whatever hit me might have been ...”

“... in London and Hertfordshire as well as Glamis, the Scottish estate granted to an ancestor, Sir John Lyon, by Robert II in 1372. While not especially wealthy by the standards of the aristocracy of her day, they can have had no anxieties about their place in society, any more than Elizabeth, tucked snugly in towards the bottom of a large and affectionate ...”

“... employment with regular hours and weekly pay. At the same time, the ‘white blouse revolution’ took another tranche of women into new commercial and professional jobs – teaching, nursing, education, clerical and shop work. ‘The servant problem’ – related to the ‘getting and controlling of servants’, as the OED of 1911 defined it – was ...”

“... the next day with an old pram and started the business of transferring them to my room at home. It took several journeys there and back to remove them all. But at the end (discounting the religious tracts and such like) I had a set of a hundred or so quarter-leather uniform hardbacks, ranging from Dumas and Gil Blas to Napier’s Peninsular War, an almost ...”

“... won the war they would never be forgiven; and it was in this desperate state of mind that Truman took the decision – with Attlee’s assent – to drop the first atom bombs. Had nuclear deterrence had to depend merely on scientific warnings or even the evidence of nuclear tests, it might not have worked. But nobody could doubt the evidence of Hiroshima and ...”

“... him only what they thought he wanted to hear. Reality rarely managed to break through. Hartwell took a close interest in the City, but it was gossip rather than expertise that he picked up. He showed how feeble his grasp of financial matters was in 1984, when the freehold of the Fleet Street office was sold to a property company and leased back at a rent of ...”

“... of Canterbury. Instead, he resigned from Harrow with almost no warning at all, and in 1860 took a decidedly unglamorous living as vicar of Doncaster. The highest he was to reach in the Church was Dean of Llandaff. The secret of his puzzling resignation probably lies in a story told in the memoirs of John Addington ...”

“... more representative of the tergiversation of the times than at first appears. Oxford in the 1840s took the double strain of the combat between the Evangelical tradition and Anglo-Catholicism and the invasion of what Newman saw as the real nightmare enemy – intellectual liberalism or ‘the wild, living intellect of man’ torn free from institutional ...”

“... drunkenly against the window. Then there was the smell, which was fetid and slightly sweet. It took me a while to find the source, and when I eventually pulled up the floorboards there was nothing left of the rat but a shrivelled sack of skin and fur, its tail a mangy question mark. I donned washing-up gloves, picked it up by the tail and put it in the ...”

“... style’, and whole new lines of children’s toys appeared glor-ifying the Boers and ridiculing John Bull. Even the pacifist Tolstoy was caught up in the wild enthusiasm for the war: ‘You know what point I’ve reached? Opening a paper every morning I passionately wish to read that the Boers have beaten the British.’ He knew that he ‘should not ...”

“... Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, author of After Reason and The Female Woman, took up the task of writing about Picasso because she had been ‘seduced by his magnetism, his intensity, that mysterious quality of inexhaustibility bursting forth from the transfixing stare of his black marble eyes as much as from his work’, but had come to be ‘chilled’ by him ...”

“... Convention was a glamorous performance. But at one point, trying to reproach the Democrats with John Adams’s phrase ‘Facts are stubborn things,’ he slipped and declared instead: ‘Facts are stupid things.’ At the moment he wished to invoke an intransigent, incontrovertible reality which would supposedly confound his enemies and bear out the ...”

“... were incendiary tracts. The latter might be thought to remain such even now, since anyone who took its view of the conditions of political legitimacy seriously would have difficulty finding a single legitimate state anywhere in the modern world. But it was Emile that initially got Rousseau into trouble. It did so by explicitly denying most of the central ...”

“... The modern scholarly literature on the history of witch beliefs and witch trials, however, first took shape in opposition to Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921), which claimed that Renaissance witches were worshippers of pagan gods. It has therefore been resolutely agnostic about the existence of actual witches in the period of the ...”