“... more scarce. The 1880s also saw Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, not to mention the remarkable growth of the Boys’ Own Paper. And not only was literature being specially produced for children: children were at last being seen as possessing an imaginative life of their own. Ariès points out how ...”

“... are indistinguishable from the current hypotheses of theoretical physicists like Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking. Parrinder’s chapters take the form of free-wheeling meditations on Wellsian topoi – ‘Possibilities of Space and Time’, ‘The Fall of Empires’, ‘Utopia and Meta-Utopia’. In Part Two of Shadows of the Future, he branches out into ...”

“... they do feel they know is that their subjects – the industrially injured with callouses like king-size buboes, the salt of the earth and their pneumoconiosis, the proud forklift drivers and the loyal company of chamfering machine operators – are pleased to stand to deferential attention for hours no matter what the weather and are proud to be just ...”

“... now spiralling out of control, as Zionist violence increased. In July 1946, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel, killing 91 people, British, Arab and Jewish. The following year, after three of its men had been condemned to death, the Irgun captured two British sergeants and hanged them in reprisal. The atmosphere grew dark; Sydney Silverman and Barnett ...”

“... hadn’t hitherto been known: no one had ever supposed that they were worth knowing about. Bluff King Hal, Bloody Mary, the Queen of Scots, the Virgin Queen: like Drake finishing his game of bowls and Raleigh spreading his cloak over a puddle, they all belonged as much to folklore as to history; and folklore, so far as enlightened opinion was ...”

“... foreigners with his high status. He returned to a troubled England, where his patron the king was already thinking of a new marriage which would provide him with an heir. In 1529, on a visit to the Sorbonne, Pole made the case to the university for Henry’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon, and made it successfully; it was a success he would later ...”

“... gang up on their targets. Phillips details the case of a Californian teenager called Chelsea King, who was raped and murdered in February 2010. Her relatives were treated as fair game, and supportive strangers who tried to intervene were themselves tracked down and hounded. RIP trolling treats grief as an exploitable state. It isn’t that the trolls ...”

“... to teenagers across the country (at almost the same time, Michael Gove was sending copies of the King James Bible, with a foreword by himself, to every school in England). The government also passed a law allowing it to appoint judges even if the opposition disagreed, and seven judges loyal to Fidesz duly joined the Constitutional Court. Orbán called this ...”

“... strands in the Labour movement. Some, such as William Adamson, Vernon Hartshorn, Thomas Shaw and Stephen Walsh, were trade union moderates; others, like Fred Jowett and John Wheatley, were socialists from the Independent Labour Party (ILP) strongholds of West Yorkshire and Clydeside. In addition, there were the Fabian intellectuals Sydney Olivier and Sidney ...”

“... in photographs sent to loved ones back home – Aladdin, Lady Precious Stream, or the Black King at Christ’s nativity, among other Orientals. The sequence of inversions and impersonations in the scene where Mr Rochester disguises himself as a Gypsy woman and tells Jane’s fortune is dizzy-making: insider playing outsider, master subordinate, male ...”

“... self-pride, laughing at his own ‘former puerile fantasies./No, we’ve never been Amazons of the king of Dahomey, nor princes of Ghana with eight hundred camels, nor wise men in Timbuktu under Askia the Great.’ In one of its most lyrical passages, the poem becomes a hymn tothose who could harness neither steam nor electricitythose who explored neither the ...”

“... and theoretician of constitutional monarchy, but his liberalism is not so easily categorised, as Stephen Holmes noted in his fine Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism. It was, not simply a vision of the laissez-faire state guaranteeing the French bourgeoisie the right to get rich – as François Guizot was famously to propose during the ...”

“... for writers such as Abel Boyer, George Ridpath and Thomas Burnet; even such a nameless name as Stephen Whatley, too obscure even to make it to the Dunciad, can be plausibly associated with several pamphlets, whilst Arthur Maynwaring is emerging from the shadows as a regular antagonist with the major authors of his day. Even where no such individual can be ...”

“... it comes to the point at which Jakobson should pass from the grammatical ‘realm’, where he is king, to the semantic realm, where a certain democracy obtains, he fizzles out. He asks us to believe that through the grammar of a poem we have a prime access to the sense, but he never proves it. Jakobson’s poetics follow rather too strictly from his ...”

“... about the Stone was precisely its absence: the fact that it had been carted off by an English king in an act of plunder which was also intended to be a symbolic act of conquest. Not the Stone, but the presence of the Stone at Westminster served to define one of the underlying realities of the English-Scottish relationship, and it continued to do so even ...”