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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... style-mad, arrogantly snobbish and incorrigibly anti-intellectual tradition. There was also the Lord Chamberlain, who exercised what amounted to a political censorship of the theatre right through until the late Sixties – one of the chief reasons why television was eventually able to suck theatrical revue dry and spit out the pips. One ...”

“... than Western prejudices about Orthodox Christianity, that would lead the British foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh to dismiss the Holy Alliance as ‘sublime mysticism and nonsense’, and the French diplomat Dominique de Pradt to call it the ‘apocalypse of diplomacy’. Krüdener’s critics, however, misunderstood both the complexity of her spirituality ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... well as business talent, to bring together A. E. W. Mason, George Douglas, Raffles, Gissing, Henry James and Jack London in the same series, and in the name of pleasure. One sees that the middlebrow had still not quite secured its grasp upon Britain. One’s sense of Buchan the man, as derived from the excellent and engaging memoir by his son William, is of ...”

“... forces are in danger of being overrun. This decision was strongly criticised by the late Lord Mountbatten and by Lord Zuckerman. It is understandable because conventional forces need a great deal of manpower, and are therefore politically embarrassing. It seems unlikely that the Warsaw Pact countries will want to ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... significant department for the Prime Minister – the ‘hole in the centre of the system’, as Lord Hunt put it. That most premiers have managed to live with this situation is testament to the strength of the amateur tradition in British politics. Even Macmillan, for all his perception of the problem, still preferred to govern by means of haphazard and ...”

“... fate of becoming an accessory to the life of a more important writer. It is his friend Henry James who keeps Sturgis’s novel distantly in view, at the same time as casting a long shadow over it. James read it in proof, and wrote a characteristic sequence of letters to Sturgis about it, beginning with neat praise and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it has since simplified its corporate structure and that it pays tax in the UK. Its current CEO, James Tugendhat, cousin of the Tory politician Tom Tugendhat, says it’s important ‘to be seen as having a transparent structure’, perhaps because ‘we are the only major provider seeking to make local authority care the core of our operating model.’The ...”