“... on her work as worthy of parody – not just recognisable, but recognised. When Thomas Hardy, John Masefield and Walter de la Mare secured her a civil list pension in 1923, Mew couldn’t decide whether it was more ‘like a dream or a nightmare’. Such diffidence also contained defiance. Her public readings were bracing affairs – ‘like having ...”

“... popinjay of scented boudoirs’. His voice initially had a high-pitched note, and after he took voice lessons, ‘its calculated changes in pitch sounded like a car changing gear.’ Duff Cooper called him an ‘adulterous, canting, slobbering Bolshie’. When Mosley switched over to Labour in 1924, his new colleagues were equally suspicious of ...”

“... history: from the celebration of genius it sometimes threatens to become, from elegy. Ford took literature seriously, but not for granted. Insofar as Return to Yesterday is a portrait of the artist as a young man, it is the portrait of a young man who for much of the time would rather be a subaltern, a historian, a pig farmer, indeed anything at ...”

“... with the publication in 2003 of its magisterial sixth volume, written by the general editor, John Baker, and covering the years 1483-1558. It then went back to the beginning, with R.H. Helmholz’s opening volume on early canon law. The rest was silence, until in 2010 the series sailed suddenly and magnificently into port without any of the remaining ...”

“... Neat penetrates the various legends put about by Henderson, who didn’t at all mind if people took him for the bastard son of the eighth or ninth Duke of Atholl, the Duke of Argyll or various other contenders, including an unnamed Italian count and diverse novelists and officers, Irish as well as Scots. Henderson, we are told, understood ‘the mystery of ...”

“... in the personal financial benefits or social status of being a director.’ The reassessment never took place, at least not in the form of a coherent plan in the interests of the game and its grass roots. In anticipation of the 1992 TV bonanza, the First Division clubs plotted to break away from the Football League, but for that they needed the FA’s ...”

“... her die. God please make her not die. I’ll do anything you say if you don’t let her die. You took the baby but don’t let her die. That was all right but don’t let her die. Please, please, dear God, don’t let her die. In the last line of the book he leaves the hospital and walks back to the hotel in the rain. The reader watches him go and worries ...”

“... about the way they were policed. The early London Metropolitan Police Special Branch, which took most of the responsibility for counter-subversion before MI5 muscled in on it, relied heavily on both – India for its officers, Ireland for its other ranks; MI5, which was staffed mainly by officers, similarly relied very largely on the colonies. Andrew ...”

“... team into the sea in honour of the chariot-driving Sun, their patron divinity. Sacrifice generally took place not in temples but out of doors. Altars could be huge staired monuments in the shape of a squared U, like the gigantic Altar of Zeus from Pergamum which takes up one (enormous) room in Berlin’s Pergamonmuseum. More often they were minimal affairs, a ...”

“... total eclipse of the Sun. Dava Sobel’s The Glass Universe: The Hidden History of the Women Who Took the Measure of the Stars begins in the late 19th century, following the story of the women (and a few men, too) who worked at the Harvard College Observatory computing the location and brightness of the stars. Many of these women progressed from being ...”

“... then complain about your wages.’ Hammond was an original, a poor farm boy with no parents who took every chance he was offered (along with quite a few he wasn’t) and rose to become a celebrated performing rider in the bullrings of Spain. He kept a journal assiduously as he went, and wrote up his Memoirs in four volumes with hand-drawn ...”

“... are many officers, including generals and admirals, who understood that the oath of office they took was a commitment to uphold and defend the constitution and not the president, or an immediate superior. Want to be a good military reporter? Find those officers.’ The same can be said about the decent operatives within the intelligence agencies ...”

“... Italian hilltop towns and dined under the stars. After the war she moved to London and in 1946 took a job at the International African Institute, editing Africa, an anthropological journal, and worked there until she retired, writing her fiction in her spare time. A busy London life included regular churchgoing. Readers could now make the obvious ...”

“... verging on modesty.’ Three centuries later, in 1956, David Harris Willson’s biography took the hostile line. Scottish historians tended to be fairer, prompting Jenny Wormald to ask in 1983 whether James was ‘two kings or one?’, so different were his historical reputations north and south of the border. Wormald and other historians have done ...”

“... A few years later, she also agreed to have a biography written by the historian Michael King, who took the approach of telling a ‘compassionate truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in unwarranted ...”