“... it is hardly surprising that the construction of a memorial to Prince Albert should prove to be, in Lytton Strachey’s words, a ‘long, complicated and difficult’ process. The story of its conception, creation and construction, which lasted from 1862 to 1876, forms the subject of this book, which, unlike the memorial, is short, clear and ...”

“... is apt to assume, on the principle that mine enemy’s enemy is my friend, that nothing much can be wrong with it. After all, an institution which manages to upset Mr Tony Benn, Lady Falkender, Mr Michael Meacher, Mr Joe Haines, the editor of the Spectator and the sub-editors of the Daily Express cannot be all bad; and ...”

“... kept for that purpose. The skins, including bearded faces, were removed and flayed, thereafter to be donned by the warriors who had captured the Spaniards. It is the aim of Inga Clendinnen to explore the ‘distinctive tonalities’, the ‘experimental landscape’, the ‘interior architecture’ of Mexica society, so as ...”

“... had led the Resistance. According to the Gaullist narrative, France went to war in 1939 weakened by internal political struggles. It was quickly crushed in 1940 by the superior weaponry of the Germans and, for the next five years, the spirit of resistance was kept alive by de Gaulle and ...”

“... seems somehow more forgivable, to the huddled ranks of Poundians at least. Critics unimpressed by the psychodrama of Eliot’s Christianity, such as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, much prefer Yeats and Stevens. And as a glance at any anthology of 20th-century British poetry will show, the prewar voices most audible today belong to Auden and MacNeice. From ...”

“... and then fought tenaciously for the succession of her son. Conventionally, these women would all be classified as ‘medieval’: Matilda and Eleanor from the 12th century, Isabella from the 14th and Margaret from the 15th. But Castor’s book also crosses what she calls ‘the artificial boundary’ between medieval and early modern: it opens and closes ...”

“... Blum, his head heavily bandaged, appeared in newspapers around the world. The story might easily be used to illustrate the extent and virulence of anti-Semitism in interwar France, and as a harbinger of the persecutions to follow under Vichy. And yet, immediately after the attack, the assembly voted to outlaw Action française and its youth movements. Three ...”

“... to Kent and on 13 June the rebels gathered on Blackheath, entering London the next day. Joined by many from the city, they sacked John of Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy and forced the king, the 14-year-old Richard II, to meet them at Mile End. There, on 14 June, Richard made major concessions, the most important being the abolition of villeinage. While ...”

“... friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh asks what things are like in the afterlife. Enkidu tells him it might be better that these truths remain hidden, but he agrees to answer the hero’s questions about the individual fates of those he knew on earth. It seems that life after death is not so different after all, a somewhat intensified but not inexplicable or ...”

“... whose dashing image it had largely been based. Three million Frenchmen donned uniform in August. By the end of September, 300,000 of them were dead, more than a fifth of the 1.3 million French soldiers who would die during the years 1914-18. By late November, the number of dead, wounded and missing stood at nearly ...”

“... the hereditary calling of the previous century, which had been to fight for the Jacobites and be executed for treason. Not that the ICS was a much safer choice: William Wedderburn joined it in 1860 shortly after his brother and sister-in-law and their child had been killed in the Mutiny. Later in his career he responded to another Scottish ...”

“... French and studded with Breton words and turns of phrase, were produced miraculously intact by Déguignet’s descendants in response to a newspaper appeal by a local history project. From them, local historians derived a continuous narrative, and the resulting Mémoires were brought out in 1998 ...”

“... Too much history can be bad for you. ‘The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living’ – that was Marx’s famous comment on France in 1848. When Nietzsche elaborated on the same idea in one of his ‘untimely meditations’, he had Germany in mind, the Prussia-writ-large created under the auspices of Bismarck ...”

“... Revolution. At the same time, everyone has their own idea about what body history should be about. It was Foucault’s view that power always expresses itself by way of the body: his history was (at least in its inception) a corporal politics, intended to reconfigure our understanding of power. At Berkeley he ran a ...”

“... perverse attachment to dictatorial regimes and their brutal methods – an irritation exacerbated by the perception that, in other ways, Shaw grew up as he grew old. But in A Strange Eventful History, Holroyd’s take on his subjects is both more pervasive and more diffuse. In essence, he has adopted the novelistic device of free indirect style, inhabiting ...”