“... along as a manager of government debt until it was finally wound up in 1853.The South Sea Company may have proved an embarrassing liability, but other companies generated the transoceanic flows of information on which imperial strategy increasingly depended. To talk up their contributions to the Enlightenment might seem like praising BP or the Sacklers for ...”

“... some were struck by seeing the names of friends or, on a repeat visit, their own earlier entries. Robert Pike took the opportunity to mention that he was ‘from London’ and a ‘patent self-adjusting truss manufacturer and merchant’.The book is a rare survival that brings us close to contemporary experience, but its scope is necessarily ...”

“... expression of Britain’s shifting ‘governing traditions’. Both quote from the memoirs of John Robert Clynes, Labour leader between 1921 and 1922 and lord privy seal in 1924. Reflecting on meeting George V, Clynes could ‘not help marvelling at the strange turn of Fortune’s wheel’ that had brought him and his colleagues ‘to this pinnacle beside the ...”

“... They also knew that an attack needed good weather and calm seas. No attempt had been made in late May, when heat records were shattered in the South of England, and German officials were confident that there wouldn’t be an invasion in early June either. The German forecasters told high command that there would be rain and gale-force winds in the English ...”

“... For​ the late French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Thomas Robert Malthus was an indispensable guide to the agrarian past. Le Roy Ladurie applied Malthus’s argument that population grows faster than subsistence to the archives of Languedoc, where, in the empirical detail of parish registers, cadastral surveys, tax rolls and price series, he perceived ‘the immense respiration of a social structure’ over the course of three centuries ...”

“... Early in​ 1971, Robert Hughes, recently appointed as Time magazine’s chief art critic, was ripping out his loft apartment at 143 Prince Street when he received an unexpected visitor. This was Henry Geldzahler, curator of modern art at the Metropolitan Museum. Hughes, probably the most macho and combative critic in his profession, was, by his own account, sweaty, foul-tempered, sore-footed and ‘grey with ingrained dirt ...”

“... edition of this book. Nor, in some sense, can it even be attempted. The Lyons translation, as Robert Irwin explains in his introduction, returns to the Arabic version that Burton used, restores the interjected outbursts of song and bawdy that Galland skipped, and sternly avoids the free and easy habits of some of his successors. It clearly aims to ...”

“... from Rotherham who joined Ukip aged eighteen, stood for Reform in local elections in Yorkshire in May 2022. He got 89 votes. In the Wakefield by-election the following month, Reform received less than 2 per cent of the vote. ‘There were only five of us working on that,’ Wood told me. ‘A lot of us were clamouring for Nigel to come back. We knew we could ...”

“... Ashburnham held the many rare manuscripts that had been donated to the nation by the antiquarian Robert Cotton, as well as the treasures of the royal manuscript collections. The flames from a fireplace had caught on the wooden mantelpiece and spread to the wainscoting. Hapless librarians were throwing water on the blaze; the city fire engines were nowhere to ...”

“... brave, and enlivened’ by an innocent love of mischief. She drily adds: ‘Of his modesty, it may be said that though everyone remarked on his reluctance to talk about himself, it is not recorded that anyone ever failed to get him to do so.’ Rider Haggard, in turn, obviously used Selous as a basis for Allan Quatermain in King Solomon’s Mines ...”

“... are very few.It​ is all but sure that Sadiq Khan will be re-elected as London’s mayor on 6 May. This will not be an exciting election; the sole uncertainty is whether Khan will win in the first round or the second. Unexciting elections give political strategists sleepless nights. Will voters turn out when the outcome is already assured? Will the ...”

“... confirms the ‘pinched, parsimonious quality’ of British attitudes in Eritrea, though it may have been an oversight, rather than a slight, on the part of an expatriate administrative force who knew they would be posted elsewhere before long. Eritrea, a settler project for the Italians, was for the British merely a brief and tiresome tour of ...”

“... was to overwhelm ‘the fire-extinguishing appliances of the community’, after which ‘the city may be destroyed in toto.’ Lanchester also came up with the idea of deterrence, predicting that, where bombing was concerned, the ‘threat of reprisal’ would always be more effective than ‘pseudo-legal’ prohibition under international law. The Zeppelins ...”

“... Bindel called it in 2018 when the Olympic diver Tom Daley announced the arrival of his baby son, Robert, by paid surrogate in California. ‘The interface between extreme capitalism and patriarchy.’ It’s interesting, as Lewis is quick to notice, that the clouds of pale and puffy human-rights speak come spiked with moments of body horror, as though ...”

“... these beginnings, an extraordinary financial and quasi-political realm was built. Its architect, Robert Hart, was just 28 when he became Inspector-General in 1863. Rapidly winning the confidence of the Chi’ng court, he went on to create the first modern administrative system in China. Its core was a fiscal bureaucracy that assured the late imperial state ...”