“... or snow-shoes, they rubbed their hands, they bellowed at one another and lit cigars, they escorted broad-hipped women. Pensioners, they were on a seasonable outing to a place where all or any of them might have served as licensed murderers. As part of an attempt to ‘reach the mystery of German behaviour in the Hitler period’ this doesn’t promise ...”

“... it was natural for Haig to suppose that he would be the one to take the weight of the world on his broad shoulders. The trouble was that the Reagan concept of the Presidency involved the total management of his time, and of access to him, by a small group of trusted advisers, whose notion of Presidential priority for domestic affairs did not include the idea ...”

“... that is, it was (English) national rather than merely metropolitan – imbued with the spirit of William Morris, enthusiastic for the new idea of a decentralising, anti-statist, bottom-up Guild Socialism. Ironically, various New Age luminaries, notably G.D.H. Cole, became some of the Statesman’s most prolific and influential contributors. Indeed the New ...”

“... of the mid-Forties got the Third Programme right straight off. The BBC’s Director-General, William Haley, credited himself with having created the network by two decisions. Programmes should take as long as they needed to, and not be curtailed to make way for, say, a fixed news bulletin. Schedulers were urged to be as creative as they liked with an ...”

“... and a craving for absolute power’. The first wave of professional academic historians, notably William Stubbs and his pupil T.F. Tout, did much to illuminate the mechanisms of Richard’s rule but they found the conundrum of his personality hard to solve. Stubbs felt that Richard’s sudden imposition of autocracy in the summer of 1397, after nearly a ...”

“... nation’. Ransom had recruited scholars and writers like Roger Shattuck, Donald Carne-Ross, William Arrowsmith and others who would have been more likely to land in the Ivy League or the great state universities. So Middleton wasn’t wanting for company. The poet David Wevill was a long-time friend and neighbour. The brilliant Swedish poet and fiction ...”

“... janitor whose asthma was exacerbated when he brushed rugs). The patent was bought and exploited by William H. Hoover, whose product revolutionised domestic cleaning. But three-quarters of a century later the ‘hygiene hypothesis’ was suggesting that things had gone too far: infections in early life mean fewer allergies later and a little bit of dirt is a ...”

“... was largely fiscally neutral, did suggest a government that had lost its grip: not so much on broad policy as on crucial details, ones the electorate is likely to remember. It managed to offend many people in the pursuit of very little, while also suggesting a cabinet out of its depth. This is the least experienced Conservative or Liberal government in ...”

“... new biography), he was accosted by an unknown American student outside Thornton’s bookshop on Broad Street and invited to sail with him and his student crew to Greece. He agreed; they left in June and Collingwood came back only shortly before war was declared. In 1940, his account of the journey, The First Mate’s Log, appeared from OUP. This frenetic ...”

“... the primitive, woodworking, neo-peasant, maypole-hugging ideological left of the NSDAP, in which broad church they were about as distant from Speer as it was possible to be. Schultze-Naumburg was unquestionably an architect. Troost was an interior decorator. Much of his career had been devoted to blinging the state rooms of Norddeutscher Lloyd ...”

“... the greatest man since the Deluge.’ This assessment of Alexander von Humboldt by King Frederick William IV of Prussia, which Andrea Wulf quotes in her fine new biography, may be a slight exaggeration, but it reflects Humboldt’s extraordinary reputation among his contemporaries. On the centennial of his birth, 14 September 1869, elaborate celebrations were ...”

“... ladies like Cecilia Gallerani and Ginevra de’ Benci (both seemingly sexier than the sallow, broad-browed Gioconda) not catch the collective imagination as she did? One answer is that during the 19th century – the key period in her route to celebrity, according to Sassoon – the Gioconda was drawing the crowds in Paris, while Cecilia and Ginevra were ...”

“... were ‘gnawing away at images as if they wished to devour their feet’. Two centuries later, William Hogarth’s disturbing etching Enthusiasm Delineated, produced between 1760 and 1762, shows parishioners with simian features devouring statuettes of Christ. Hogarth, a deist, was attacking both icon worship and the sacrament of the Eucharist, tarring ...”

“... is the Wilcote chapel, a fan-vaulted two-bayed chantry of exquisite perfection. In it lies Sir William Wilcote, MP for Oxfordshire under Richard II and Henry IV, who died in 1411. He is shown in alabaster armour, with a collar of SS (the Lancastrian badge), his eagle coat of arms on his jupon and a chaplet round his helm. Beside him his wife with a rich ...”

“... never misses an opportunity for attack,’ John Gawsworth, an admiring contemporary, observed. William Rothenstein thought him ‘armed and armoured, like a tank, ready to cross any country, however rough and hostile’. He certainly had a genius for pugnacity, no doubt partly encouraged by the example Hulme set: ‘a very rude and truculent man’ in ...”