“... he sang them into mawkish sentiment, song by song. He was a great singles artist: he sang, perhaps more than anyone else in the popular imagination, for three minutes at a time. There is no consistent, cumulative, considered body of work bequeathed to us – and therefore probably no unified field theory that will embrace Elvis and America. The King ...”

“... o’clock salons – known as ‘a Menagerie of Live Authors’ – introduced her to the work of Thomas Paine, William Blake, Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley. Johnson taught her to ‘offend, alienate and strenuously disagree’ in her unsigned pieces for his monthly Analytical Review; with his encouragement she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of ...”

“... questions seek ways to prompt or direct the domestic courts to interpret or apply rights more restrictively than they have done under the Human Rights Act.The consultation asks how we can ‘make sure deportations that are in the public interest are not frustrated by human rights claims’ and canvasses views on how the UK could address ‘the ...”

“... before and turned down an opportunity to meet General Ludendorff. Others were also worried: Thomas Mann noted that while ‘Wagner will never cease to interest me . . . Bayreuth as it now presents itself interests me not at all.’ Hamann reports every passion, tiff and row, every argument that took place over the hiring and firing of the great ...”

“... A modern criminal trial can be exceedingly inconvenient. The more fairly conducted it is, the less certain the outcome. The accuser can end up all but in the dock; the accused may walk away from a true bill. Churchill, well aware of this, wanted the Nazi leaders, when they were finally captured, to be taken out and shot ...”

“... endlessly with customs officials and ended up paying much of the time. The young Swiss physician Thomas Platter had better luck at the end of the 16th century. His passport issued in Geneva was accepted on the Rhone boat from Lyon, but passengers without papers simply bribed the boatmen and on they went. To enter Catholic Spain, Platter persuaded the border ...”

“... On​ 10 January 1616, Sir Thomas Roe was received by Emperor Jahangir at his court in Ajmer in Northern India. Jahangir sat in an overhead gallery, with guests standing in hierarchically ranked tiers, and Roe remarked how ‘this sitting out hath so much affinity with a theatre … the king in his gallery; the great men lifted on a stage as actors; the vulgar below gazing on ...”

“... from that of their wary younger colleagues. Nowadays people take fewer organic diseases, and more social and psychological conditions, to their doctors. Those organic conditions they do bring are usually chronic, and harder to treat. They bring them earlier than they used to, which makes diagnosis more difficult. They ...”

“... terror about the invasion and pillaging of her brain, ‘her treasure whose price he, not more than the nurses, could estimate’. In some way Stafford felt herself not only damaged but violated. Yet she fought against understanding her own anger, diverting it as much into meanness and booze as into art; indeed, she would have been furious at any ...”

“... may not seem incomplete. Broch worked on it for almost twenty years, while completing other work. More than one version of The Spell has been published. One of them is called The Tempter. The tale is told by a country doctor in the Austrian Alps: his practice covers two villages, the Upper Village and the Lower Village, on the side of Mount Kuppron. He is a ...”

“... for his children’s welfare and proud of their achievements. Rehabilitating Branwell requires more skill. The Branwell of established legend was a weak and dissolute parasite for the sake of whose unrealistic and expensive ambitions his sisters sacrificed themselves – a hard case. The new Branwell bears a certain resemblance to the old: like him, he ...”

“... they have rightly been indignant about its victims – peasants, hand-loom weavers, slaves – and more interested in the resistance to it – from bandits, millennarians etc. Perhaps there is also a fear of being drowned in the quicksands of conventional political and constitutional history (‘How many boroughs did the Duke of Newcastle ...”

“... from Calais, travelling in coaches, receiving the amorous attentions of women who found him far more sympathetic than their husbands, and taking exercise by tying himself to the coach door with string and running beside it. In Naples he met an old shipmate turned some sort of spy, and for a while the two of them travelled together. Holman’s ...”

“... who could dictate six thousand words between lunch and tea, or Georges Simenon, who rarely spent more than a fortnight on a novel. But Dumas was not merely a novelist: he also wrote plays, travel books, memoirs, histories, accounts of great crimes plus a mass of ‘occasional’ writings which include his vast Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine. Even as a ...”

“... library (the Bible, Prayer Book and The Pilgrim’s Progress) ‘Prime old Tusser’ – Thomas Tusser’s A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie, first published in 1557. As towns grew, so did the need for market gardens to feed their inhabitants. Willes emphasises how much the commercialisation of food, the expansion of markets and the nursery trade ...”