“... were supported by the Whigs. Indeed, the subsequent formation of the Liberal Party, though it took twenty years of faltering manoeuvres to accomplish, entailed a Parliamentary union between Peelites like Gladstone and Whigs like Lord John Russell. The Gladstonian Liberal Party, which was to dominate Victorian ...”

“... Sir John Low​ finally hung up his helmet seventy years after joining the Madras army in 1804, having served the East India Company as soldier, jailer, agent and councillor. As a rookie lieutenant, his regiment mopped up in Mysore when the British took over the old kingdom of Tipu Sultan ...”

“... play with his thoughts and personality. Dorothy began to keep a journal at Racedown, but she took it up again at Dove Cottage after William and his brother John had gone off on a visit, leaving her alone a few days. ‘I resolved to write a journal of the time till W and J return and I set about keeping my ...”

“... In the London Review of Books, John Maynard Smith said about scientists: ‘however interested they may be in politics or history or philosophy, their first love is science itself.’ If only I could follow this bent, and tell something of Hamilton as a mathematician. As it happens, he also wrote a good deal of poetry, but his poems lack the magic of his equations, which seem more beautiful and moving now than when they were imagined 150 years ago ...”

“... because the tensions and problems are simply too great for anyone. This is in part the theme of John Morrison’s efficient and often thoughtful biography, which sets out to show that, contrary to the view held (at least until recently) by many observers and politicians in the West, Yeltsin is ‘squarely in the democrats’ camp’. He reminds us that, as ...”

“... Brought before Pharaoh’s Daughter’ (1736) ‘Hannah Osborne, Daughter of John Ranby’ (c.1747-50) detail of ‘Captain Thomas Coram’ (1740)PreviousNext In a thoughtful essay Lamb himself attacked the notion that what is most Hogarthian about Hogarth is what is most broadly comic, most boisterous, most fun. This, he claims, is ...”

“... an apparatchik to get on without them. These were rituals in which everyone, without exception, took part. Vaksberg, though a Gorbachev admirer, retells a story which went the rounds of Moscow at the beginning of 1989, to the effect that an edition of the popular investigative programme Vzglad had been banned because it showed an interview with Galina ...”

“... the powerful surge of water. For an instant the thought crossed her mind to run wherever her feet took her, away from the man who was waiting for her in the green cave [of the haystack], but she knew she wouldn’t.’ And so, a virgin from a virgin land, she gives herself to the Muscovite, whose child she bears. One can see what’s meant here – technology ...”

“... to dictatorial means to carry through its will: these, under Stalin, became routinised and took precedence over, then finally snuffed out, most of the vestiges of political life. By the end of the Terror, McAuley argues, the dominance of the Party had been replaced by that of the NKVD – and ‘the dislocation created by the system of terror was so ...”

“... of winter’; I could have lived happily in a world of perpetual cold. So when I began reading John Evelyn’s diary entries for January and February 1684, I should have been delighted. Instead, I felt an odd revulsion: 9 January: I went across the Thames on the ice, now become so thick as to bear not only streets of booths, in which they roasted ...”

“... to day activities of his political career. Every now and then, Disraeli opened this storehouse, took out a handful of ideas and tested them as creatures of fiction or as deft phrases for a speech. After carefully perfecting and polishing them, Disraeli put the ideas back in the cupboard for another day. This authorises a blanket dismissal of the ...”

“... tricks of scale, luminosity and outline to make his sitters loom large within their frames. He took his cue from the Dutch followers of Caravaggio – the so-called Utrecht Caravaggisti, such as Gerrit van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen – who lent presence to their figures through dramatic use of light and shade. The turbaned man’s features are ...”

“... who win Mastermind. Now his own long-heralded account of his experiences has been published. John Stalker had been Deputy Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police for only two months when he was asked to conduct an investigation into matters arising out of three incidents in Northern Ireland, where Royal Ulster Constabulary officers had shot and ...”

“... in reverse, Though we were still. Like cigarettes and cokes This was their slight excitement, took up slack In time that wound by, idle. Nothing worse And nothing better. To me it seemed so short,           I wanted more, I wanted hours, I wanted to be caught In that dense undergrowth by that wet shore. This was an exit from our boring life, A ...”

“... subjects might as well have stuck their heads through a hole in a pre-painted background. But as John Brewer emphasises in his catalogue essay, the Tour was more socially mixed than it might appear. Basset, the biggest spender among the consigners to the Westmorland, was not an aristocrat but the beneficiary of a recent family fortune made from Cornish ...”