“... ruler of late-16th-century Scotland and as the first British king’. Anna Whitelock’s The Sun Rising, also from this year, is not a conventional biography of James: favourites and hot-headed Protestants are replaced by busy merchants and diplomats in a narrative of the messy birth of the British Empire. Susan Doran’s From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime ...”

“... government. Late in 1998, amid rumours that his job was being lined up for one of New Labour’s rising stars such as Jack Straw or Peter Mandelson, Cook may indeed have been thinking hard about escape routes to the European Commission or the Scottish Parliament, but that doesn’t mean he was already a busted flush. He did, after all, survive another five ...”

“... shut away. But for the rest of his reign Henry VII would be plagued by pretenders, persistently rising from the dead. Because she was a girl Margaret did not represent the same threat. No one would stage a rebellion in her favour while there were male Yorkists to mount a challenge. Her early years are obscure. Her mother, the great heiress Isabel ...”

“... cartography of Christopher Saxton and his patrons, collaborators and surveyors, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was to Elizabeth I what Cromwell was to Henry VIII, could see England as a whole, and as a collection of coloured counties, together with lines of communication and the seats of its more notable inhabitants. This resource was not available to ...”

“... of translators – Bellos and Whiteside and Schwartz, Anthea Bell, Linda Coverdale, David Coward, Howard Curtis, William Hobson, Sian Reynolds, David Watson – but, or and, one of the remarkable features of the project is how consistent the tone is across the books. When you look at the range of tones and voices in the same publisher’s multi-translator ...”

“... another explanation, however. It was just a ‘taboo’, he writes (quoting the historian Michael Howard), like ‘intra-marital sex’. Everyone knew it went on, and was ‘quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions about it’ was ‘regarded as extremely bad form’. But that was not so, certainly at the start, and in connection ...”

“... Myth of the Middle Class’. Rightly pointing out that the middle class tends to be continually rising in historians’ accounts, and that the phrase is frequently used without proper definition, Hexter too easily knocks down his men of straw. Some historians argued that ‘the middle class’ ruled England in the 16th century; others argued that ‘the ...”

“... at bottom – to be non-ideological. In The Case for Conservatism (1947) Quintin Hogg, later Lord Hailsham, had contended that whereas socialism was an all-encompassing philosophy of change, Conservatism was a disposition of relative contentment, and one, moreover, that accorded a very circumscribed place to politics in the range of human ...”

“... those who have always argued that Britain only listens to guns and bombs, that the Easter Rising and the War of Independence achieved what the Home Rulers at Westminster could not, that IRA guns and Semtex would force the Brits out – have generally held sway over those who argued that violence only polarised the situation and delayed British ...”

“... squeezed out of them: in the theatre they provide the vehicles for self-seeking actors, ambitious Lord Chamberlains and profiteers out to make money from evening entertainments. They’re plundered and castrated; so they survive ... A rigid cult would be dangerous, like the ceremonial which forbade Byzantine courtiers to touch the persons of the nobility, so ...”

“... the world, old legal and moral barriers were also dismantled at home. Just as Coates entered Howard University and began his harsh education in American history, the stage was set for a pitiless imposition of market discipline and evisceration of welfare-state protections. Such drastic socioeconomic re-engineering required a fresh public consensus, and a ...”

“... monastic colleges quite recently founded in Oxford and Cambridge. Monastic populations were rising, especially in the larger houses, as they had not done since England’s demographic disasters in the 14th century, and there were recruits to the monastic life even in its last year. A politically aware head of house would no doubt also have rejoiced ...”

“... Pevsner in 1945. Along with Pevsner’s own Buildings of England, launched the same year, and Howard Colvin’s Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, first published in 1954, it laid the foundations and established the boundaries of academic architectural history for the postwar period. Pevsner, Summerson and Colvin have cast long shadows. The ...”

“... bells. The gigantic tripods had crossed the Hudson ‘the way a man crosses a brook’, and were rising ‘like a line of new towers on the city’s west side’. Now the Martian poison gas was oozing across Sixth Avenue. Now Fifth. The reporter coughed, and there was a sickly chiming of bells. Thirty-nine minutes passed before the programme identified ...”

“... their lives and livelihoods are at greater risk from deadly heatwaves, drought, crop failure, rising tides. The lesser status of their suffering only makes this more acute. As Mary Heglar has written, such suffering ‘barely registers as newsworthy. It’s just “a thing that happens” … It’s the reason Nigerians and Indians fleeing Ukraine are ...”