“... accessible material has been quarried to the point of staleness and the figures still remaining to be disinterred lie buried at remoter historical levels, from which they can be extracted only with the deploying of more sophisticated methods. A sample of the new layer of riches that we can expect to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 19th century. But they were still a long way beneath, and they could not have been detected merely by looking at the statistics. Much the same applies to the decline of the Labour Party. Britain is the oldest industrial society in the world, with the most mature working class. She has no peasantry, and virtually no religious cleavages. She has (or had until ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... vote for that leader, when they tell their friends that she is the best candidate. But it can also be something much vaguer. The problem with the interpretation of the verb ‘support’ by the police and courts in Britain today is that the state accepts no limit to its meaning. Since October 2023, the police and the Crown ...”

“... tell whether a new consensus will replace it, or, if so, what the shape of that new consensus will be. The neo-liberal and neo-Marxist models offered by the Thatcherite Right and Bennite Left respectively are patently archaic and barren. Both rest on assumptions drawn from the primitive industrialism of the early 19th ...”

“... for ‘Beaumarchais’ has long been the brand-name of a product variously reprocessed by Mozart, Rossini and the score or so librettists and musicians who have perpetuated his plots, his characters and his name. The most intriguing question of all has centred on his role as catalyst of the Revolution. Was his impertinent barber the Sweeney Todd of ...”

“... across Europe. Fencing had already become an important part of the German university curriculum by 1600, boosted by contacts with Spain and Italy, as well as France. In the 17th century, thanks to frequent encounters with Richelieu’s armies in the Thirty Years’ War, the duel established itself in the Holy Roman ...”

“... account, the life and love of Dora Jordan would occupy a place both ample and ambiguous. It would be ample because for more than twenty years she was the consort of the Duke of Clarence, the future King William IV, bore him ten children and lived with him in a state of domestic happiness and connubial bliss. But it would also ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fed up with his life so far, and perches precariously on a derelict factory roof, resolving to be independent and free from this on out: ‘I didnay care, that was how they called for me, well they could call for me all their life, that was how long they could call, that was from now on, cause I was finished with it; I wasnay sure what I was gony do, no ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”