“... disloyalty, ambition, greed, insecurity and all the British hypocrisies that he crashed into. John Preston has made the most of it, providing not only a very readable and amusing book but also the fullest account yet of what actually happened. Some of his sourcing could be clearer – there are rather vague appendices and no footnotes – but he is ...”

“... true church’, but not ‘the unspotted lambs of the Lord’ as the Elizabethan chronicler John Stow claimed (this was another slur: Stow had Catholic sympathies).Puritanism has long commanded historical attention. Collinson helped put the politics back in, working with the grain of the ‘new’ social and cultural histories of the 1980s. What emerged ...”

“... neatly divided by four traditional ‘quarter days’ – Annunciation (25 March), the Nativity of John the Baptist (24 June), Michaelmas (29 September) and Christmas – that were used as deadlines for instalments of rent and debt.The annual religious cycle melded with older traditions of seasonal celebration, and spurred new ones too. In England the calendar ...”

“... of grandmothers’.Psychological Care for Infant and Child (1928) by the American behaviourist John Watson (a follower of Truby King) found enthusiastic readers in interwar Britain. Behaviourist thinking separated the adult and the child into discrete categories. The child is the ‘shadow’ cast by the adult citizen, more animal than human: ‘If you ...”

“... field for a woman. Its policy on female employees was unusually egalitarian. When Matheson met John Reith, the first director-general, through her work for Astor, he recruited her to be director of talks on the phenomenal salary of £900 a year. She was 38 and unmarried, fully formed as a character. Yet the Matheson of this period remains, despite her ...”

“... the party’s co-operation agreement with the Scottish Greens. Yousaf and his replacement, John Swinney, sullied their reputations by defending the former health secretary Michael Matheson, who misled Holyrood’s presiding officer over £11,000 of roaming charges racked up on his iPad. The SNP’s centralising tendencies, lack of transparency and ...”

“... Only A Vindication of the Rights of Woman could be readily bought, in an Everyman, bound up with John Stuart Mill’s On the Subjection of Women. In a second-hand shop I found a 1906 edition of her Original Stories (for children), with an introduction by E.V. Lucas and five of the Blake plates reproduced. The other modern edition I acquired was called The ...”

“... that Picasso, towards the end of his life, became addicted to all-in wrestling on the telly – as John Richardson informs us in the sympathetic account of those years (and brave attempt to defend Picasso’s late work) which appeared in the New York Review of Books on 19 July 1984. However private these sketchbooks were, they reveal, more and more as we ...”

“... sent to Lewes by his literary friends on receiving copies of his clearly lamentable novels. John Stuart Mill wrote explaining that he needed to read the book through a second time before making his comments, though meanwhile he liked it ‘on the whole decidedly better than I expected from your own account of it’, Bulwer Lytton pronounced: ‘You have ...”

“... are quite explicit about sex. There is a good deal of masturbation, a dress stained with semen (John Gilbert’s), lesbian couplings, Stokowski failing to make it, Churchill groping and salivating on the Onassis yacht, and a total disavowal of the famous interlude with Cecil Beaton. If Gronowicz’s transcriptions are to be believed, Greta Garbo kept no ...”

“... the politicians against the war, the writers against the war – Edward Pearce in the Guardian, John Diamond in the Mirror, John Pilger wherever anyone prints what he writes – have to be winkled out from the chauvinist mass. How to explain the mood which swept otherwise independent-minded journalists and editors into ...”

“... lover Gaston Palewski (‘Colonel’), she reports that Odette Massigli is having an affair with John Lehmann, who had never liked women before’. ‘Are you shrieking, Colonel?’ One hopes that he was. ‘I have been screaming with laughter for several days on end,’ Nancy reports, after reading a life of Queen Victoria. The French General Election of ...”

“... Press. Girodias is one of the major characters in Campbell’s story, and the major character of John de St Jorre’s preposterously indulgent narrative of what he calls ‘the erotic voyage of the Olympia Press’. Girodias was a publisher not only of the forbidden avant garde, but also of pornography. The Merlin boys got into the act, forming a kind of ...”

“... to signal the onset of a post-imperialist culture. The best example of this is Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale’s Unhappy Valley, a wide-ranging and masterly discussion of the colonial years in central Kenya. Both authors display an admirable erudition, Berman in concentrating on white-settler and colonial concerns and administration, Lonsdale on African ...”

“... flux. They are no longer able to sink their internal differences in a broad attachment to what Sir John Seeley called ‘Greater Britain’. They are not yet sure, most of them, that they want to be Europeans. Yet many do not see themselves, or desire to see themselves, as British. Is the answer, then, for the monarchy to revive one of its most traditional ...”