“... with the consent and approbation of his master’ and ‘Samuel Baron, son of the African King, Oaramby, alias Johnson’. Two sides of the African presence are revealed here. First, there was a subculture of slave ownership by white masters, although this was illegal under the common law. Newspapers often printed ‘for sale’ or ...”

“... more than simply years, though living from 1705 to 1793 was a good start. As chief justice of the King’s Bench for 32 years, he modernised an antiquated system of common law and rationalised a diffuse system of mercantile law; he drafted statutes; he played a central role in politics as cabinet member, counsellor and confidant; he knew everyone from Boswell ...”

“... says that this book – together with her famous series of radio dramas The Man Born to be King – is her greatest work. And Barbara Reynolds should know. She is the goddaughter of Sayers; she is a distinguished Italian scholar and collaborated with Sayers on her translation of The Divine Comedy (a collaboration fascinatingly written up in her book ...”

“... a devastating sort as well. It is not so long ago, indeed, that I experienced a sharp regret that John Carey’s unstinted praise of work that I had done had also provided the occasion for his fierce underestimation of work by a friend and countryman of mine. Still, it is inevitable that this kind of complication enter into the relations between poets and ...”

“... The legend of King Arthur must be the most enduring legacy of the Middle Ages. Everyone knows it: children, scholars, readers of comic books, movie-makers. The scenes and motifs associated with it – Excalibur, the Round Table, the adultery of Guinevere, the return to Avalon – are more familiar than anything linked to real medieval kings ...”

“... and she chafed against the lot which compelled her to watch her menfolk destroying wild life. John Gore, in his life of George V, suggested that her intellectual life might have been starved and her energies atrophied in those early years. George was not a man who lightly opened a book, other than a stamp album, but his bride read to him at ...”

“... were not painful enough, the malign intelligence behind the plot had been the kaiser’s uncle, King Edward VII, who had died in 1910: This, in a nutshell, is the true, naked situation engineered so slowly and surely by Edward VII, elaborated and systematically expanded through covert talks with Paris and St Petersburg, and at last brought to completion ...”

“... overshadowed by a sale of Impressionist art at Christie’s, and almost escaped the attention of John Maynard Keynes, a Newton enthusiast. As it was, Keynes missed most of the lots, and shortly after the auction set about clawing back papers from successful bidders. Most of what he recovered concerned alchemy. On his death in 1946, Keynes bequeathed what is ...”

“... The psychologist John Layard – ‘Loony Layard’, as he is affectionately termed in one of Auden’s early poems – is said to have told a submarine officer that he had grown a beard as a masculine protest against the mechanical womb he inhabited. And in Portrait of the Artist a young man informs his friend that he admires, the Venus de Milo because her broad hips show she would be good at bearing his children ...”

“... that J.G.A. Pocock told him that Conrad Russell told him that Bertrand Russell told him that Lord John Russell told him that his father the sixth Duke of Bedford told him that he had heard William Pitt the Younger speak in Parliament during the Napoleonic Wars, and that Pitt had this curious way of talking, a particular mannerism that the sixth Duke of ...”

“... follow. Even Day-Lewis was not wholly exempt from it when he received the laurels. His predecessor John Masefield had his merits, but writing good verse for occasions was not one of them. Indeed there is an interesting resemblance between the ghastly good taste of the modern tombstone – in chaste Cotswold or slate with a brief restrained inscription – and ...”

“... how it all comes out.’ Thomas Edison’s first words were ‘It is very beautiful over there.’ John Ford’s first words were ‘May I please have a cigar?’ Ulysses S. Grant’s first word was ‘Water.’ Prince Henry’s first words were ‘I would say something but I cannot utter.’ Washington Irving’s first words were ‘When will this ...”

“... of a low-caste 19th-century Brazilian who enriched himself as a slave trader and befriended the King of Dahomey in the process; On the Black Hill (1982) tells the life-story of a pair of identical twins in a Radnorshire farmhouse. Both books have a basis in fact, though the second has the label ‘novel’ attached to it; both books reflect Chatwin’s ...”

“... on the years 1500-1800, is to remind us of what could be seen as the glory days of habeas corpus. John Anderson was a slave in Missouri. Separated from his wife and family, whom he wished to visit, he came into conflict with his master and owner, who decided to resolve the problem by selling Anderson to another owner. In 1853, Anderson escaped and made for ...”

“... heavily upon the skill of the teller and Duby is here in cracking form. His recently acquired King Charles’s head of the Three Orders of society is absent and the dread shadow of G. Dumézil falls only once across these pages. The tone is often immensely rhetorical in the current Parisian manner, but the charged emotional style is all part of Duby’s ...”