“... men are not overdressed. The most elaborately dressed military man that I have ever seen was Lord Mountbatten, got up to take the salute at what I think was a rehearsal of the Trooping of the Colour. His uniform would have been the envy of the Kaiser, and would have made an Argentine general look like a dustman. The person I have met who was most moved ...”

“... Establishment is that she is reputedly flirting with Roman Catholicism. This inspires those like Lord Rees-Mogg to hope that the hapless Diana may finally shatter the Act of Settlement of 1701 which banned Catholic monarchs from inheriting this kingdom, and heirs to the throne from marrying Catholics. After all, even if she divorces her husband, she will ...”

“... How can we know Samuel Johnson without summoning him through the reanimating power of James Boswell’s Life? For the many scholars, writers, readers and collectors who call themselves Johnsonians, this is the near impossible task. Boswell first met Johnson in 1763, in the back parlour of a bookshop. It belonged to a friend of Johnson, Thomas ...”

“... they had offended his father), the notoriety given them in speeches by the attorney-general and Lord Sidmouth, the home secretary, both of whom anticipated the judgment of the court by telling Parliament that the parodies were libellous, ensured that they were republished in major towns and cities from Southampton to Newcastle. The government determined to ...”

“... digging coal mines. In the British view, India’s destiny was to remain what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson called in Why Nations Fail (2012) an ‘extractive colony’. The Raj was seen at its worst in the hardest times, responding to poor harvests and the resulting famines as reluctantly as the home government did in Ireland. The last large-scale ...”

“... its Jebusite inhabitants and proclaimed it his capital, he danced in his exaltation ‘before the Lord with all his might … girded with a linen ephod’ – the sort of apron priests wore and so not appropriate for kings. This was a sure sign that he had got religion with a vengeance. Michal, one of his wives, ‘looked through a window, and saw King David ...”

“... technology: less 2000 than 2001. The first plate shows ‘Analyst/Programmer Peter James at work on the British Library Online Catalogue’. Peter James’s head is cropped to give a central prominence to his hands on the keyboard and the all-important screen which displays ...”

“... The keeping of diaries prompts the question why, and for whom? James Boswell at 22, and going to London for the first time, piously hoped that keeping a diary might engender ‘a habit of application and improve me in expression’, possibly even ‘make me more careful to do well’. At all events, 24 pages of this self-imposed devoir were sent off each Tuesday to his friend John Johnston of Grange, a dullish youth of about Boswell’s own age, but one in whose affectionate and uncritical company he felt more at peace than with anyone ...”

“... and Geertz, but anyone who wants to engage in such an enterprise should read Graham Greene’s Lord Rochester’s Monkey, 1974.) Historians of England have been slow to turn to microhistory because the evidence in English common law courts was spoken not written, trials usually lasted only a few minutes (Castlehaven’s trial, to which I will turn in a ...”

“... sepoys, a string of greyhounds, a yacht and a stud of pedigree Arabs. He sought to make himself lord of Arabia by an alliance with the Wahhabi, which instantly flopped. Undaunted, he turned north to try his luck with ‘our Koordistan’, admiring the purity of their mountain lifestyle. The romanticising of the Kurds became less popular with the British ...”

“... when he shall make us a praise and a glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: the Lord make it like that of New England. For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.’ The Puritan separatists were the first to try to realise a dream that recurs like a refrain in American history: what ...”

“... had a keen sense of what her characters did next was revealed by her nephew and early biographer, James Edward Austen-Leigh. He reported that Austen told her family: ‘Mr Woodhouse survived his daughter’s marriage and kept her and Mr Knightley from settling at Donwell about two years.’Most readers of Austen’s fiction feel instinctively that her ...”

“... Yet our Blairite interim house has about 600 members and the fully reformed one proposed by Lord Wakeham would have 550 (with no statutory upper limit on its numbers). Only the Italian Senate with 326 would approach this. The worldwide norm is for the upper house to be much smaller than the lower – on average about 60 per cent of its ...”

“... still speaks directly to anyone who feels they are in the power of Mr Worldly-Wiseman, ‘my Lord Turn-about, my Lord Time-server, my Lord Fair-speech . . . Mr Smooth-man, Mr Facing-bothways, Mr Any-thing; and the parson of our parish, Mr Two-tongues’. These visionary caricatures ...”

“... officer and was shot and injured during the Troubles. She lives near the stately home of the late Lord Brookeborough, who, after the Northern Irish state was established, urged Protestant employers not to hire Catholics because their loyalty could not be relied on. He himself, he boasted, had ‘not one about my place’. From the start, unionism had to ...”