“... man. For him Philby and Co are the modern equivalents of heroic Jesuit priests plotting against Elizabeth. In Le Carré’s world the dingy agents of the KGB and MI6 are interchangeable. Who can forget A.J.P. Taylor’s jibe that no spy ever told his masters anything of value they could not have gleaned from the press? Or Malcolm Muggeridge’s chronicles ...”

“... followed, his was still the third most cited name in the American press, behind Ronald Reagan and Elizabeth Taylor. He went on to advise presidents of all stripes, commanded huge fees on Wall Street, was lionised in China and feted by publishers. This has continued into his late nineties. Kissinger has always liked to draw a historical parallel from the first ...”

“... hardly at all. In his youth he had the courage of his unconcern: Nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the north-west died away; Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay; Bluish mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay; In the dimmest north-east distance, dawned Gibraltar grand and gray; ‘Here and here ...”

“... mortality pattern of the period appears to lie within the systems covered by the Princeton North tables. Another problem patch is the 17th-century Interregnum, for replacement of ecclesiastical by secular registration created its own problems of under-recording. Some of the adjustments made are fairly arbitrary: in 17th-century London, plague ...”

“... chamberlain and his marshal’, had just been killed in the Süntel hills some sixty kilometres north-east of the source of the River Lippe. Latin’s lack of definite and indefinite articles leaves ambiguities in the annals that modern writers in German or English tend to iron out by inserting ‘the’ whenever Saxons appear. This can mislead. Becher ...”

“... in Germany to ease her family’s financial situation. She later taught at a girls’ school in North London and worked as a governess. But after her father was declared bankrupt in 1893, and her mother committed suicide in 1895, Richardson decided to make a fresh start by moving to London and living on her own. She rented an attic room on the edge of ...”

“... might easily have been avoided. For example, when the young Mansfield, touring remote parts of the North Island, buys ‘a Maori kit’, Tomalin explains that this is ‘a version of traditional Maori costume’. But a Maori kit is a basket of woven flax (the Maori word is kete). Later we have Mansfield wearing her ‘kit’ in London. It is easy to defend ...”

“... the Calvinist international was often a matter of words or gestures, which cost rulers nothing. Elizabeth I, in spite of ‘la mauvaise opinion’ which she held of Geneva after John Knox had written his First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women there, found it convenient to mouth pious concern for her distressed co-religionists ...”

“... his most bitingly satirical and contemptuous poems about the bourgeoisie being read by stars like Elizabeth Taylor and Eve-Marie Saint, to whoops of delight from a well-to-do, enlightened middle-class audience. He was (to put it moderately) unenthusiastic about academics: yet here were numbers of professors competing for what one can only call ‘bits’ of ...”

“... however, it was Benjamin Jesty who deserves priority as the first known vaccinator. Benjamin and Elizabeth Jesty lived with their three children in Yetminster, North Dorset. In 1774, it was commonly believed that milkmaids were protected from smallpox because of previous exposure to the cowpox ...”

“... Woolf considered her musings about the war to be a ‘whiff of shot in the cause of freedom’. Elizabeth Bowen was even more grandiloquent: ‘Wartime writing is in a sense resistance writing.’ But in fact their subject and the attitude they were required to adopt forced them along paths which were not familiar to them, and often not ...”

“... In England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ‘unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower’. ‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the ...”

“... doesn’t shine’ is pure ‘Carry on up the Corner Flag’. Later, Kuper interviews the Preston North End winger Tom Finney about the Cup Final of 1941, when Preston beat Arsenal. Wasn’t it odd, he asks, to play the final in bombed-out London? ‘I wasn’t all that interested in the war when I was playing,’ Finney answers. ‘I was only 18. And the ...”

“... growing more African. He told stories of his ancestors – who came back to the Gold Coast from North America – freed slaves – including his grandfather, a prosperous trader, called Buck Savage . . . They were very English indeed these immigrant Creoles . . . went on the grand tour – bought Victorian plush furniture and so forth. In Cameroun he ...”

“... newspapers, August 2011: Natasha Reid, 24, pleaded guilty to stealing a television from a Comet in North London during the riots of 7 August. Her mother said she was ‘baffled’ by her own behaviour – she had a much nicer TV set at home. Shonola Smith, 22, pleaded guilty, along with her sister and a friend, to ‘entering’ Argos in Croydon: ‘The ...”