“... argument against his taking up French.’ His handwriting ‘was, and remained, unschooled’, William Feaver writes in his new biography, and adds: ‘Having to learn to write with his right hand in a new language and a new script prompted him to feel that such discipline, being foreign to him, was not for him. This became his pattern of behaviour at ...”

“... 1939. Whether Cameron holds to this notion of history, or whether it is rather a preoccupation of William Hague’s, is a matter of speculation. It was Cameron who negotiated the party’s departure from the quasi-Christian Democratic bloc in the European Parliament into the reactionary rag-bag where the Tory MEPs now nestle. (Though to judge by the opinions ...”

“... in vogue, so were many other things.’ Hard to argue with that. The thesis clearly reflects broad historical realities to the extent that cultural production got overshadowed by the long-arriving Second World War. The more the international situation became a cause for despair, the more tempting it became to concentrate your attention on your own ...”

“... the ‘gulf of mutual incomprehension’ that separated ministers and civil servants from ‘the broad mass of the British public’. Ordinary MPs and the press thought they had a better grasp of popular opinion, but they may not have done. This was a serious matter: if the government was to take the people along with it, it had to know how they felt and ...”

“... having more information? (Questions like this abound in the law. Agreement on the balance is rare. William Blackstone thought it better for ten guilty men to escape criminal sanction than for one innocent man to be convicted. Matthew Hale put the ratio at five to one, Benjamin Franklin at a hundred to one. Bismarck, customarily robust, thought Blackstone had ...”

“... highest benches of the Legislative Assembly. Neither the provincial geography of the book, nor its broad conclusions, would have displeased Georges Lefebvre, the interwar pioneer of history from below. What is lost in terms of the familiar drama of the revolution is gained in the portrayal of innumerable ordinary citizens who were obliged to pick sides and ...”

“... example of how ‘microhistory’, based on a deep immersion in local sources, can illuminate broad historical patterns. It also suggests some of the limitations of this increasingly popular genre of historical analysis.A Mind to Stay spans nearly two centuries of history. The first part, which begins in the antebellum period, focuses on the experiences ...”

“... to music texts recalled from memory. Friends were soon killed, or reported killed. When the poet William Harvey, with whom he had had an intense friendship, was taken prisoner but presumed dead, Gurney wrote ‘To His Love’: ‘with thick-set/Masses of memoried flowers –/Hide that red wet/Thing I must somehow forget.’ A corporal with whom he had fallen ...”

“... told, much less filmed, so perhaps it is worth restating the main lines. In 1787, Lieutenant William Bligh, RN, aged 33, was given the command of HM Armed Vessel Bounty of 215 tons and four four-pounder guns, a merchantman bought by the Navy Board and fitted up with the help of Sir Joseph Banks, who was then guiding Kew towards its glorious future, as a ...”

“... the author follows the glow in the dark across the work of several novelists – Remarque, Mailer, William Styron, Hemingway – confirms this. ‘I have noted all the cigarettes that are crushed out, thrown away or unlit at night, shared and hoarded, detested and loved – instruments of torture and surgery, tokens of friendship and signs of love – in ...”

“... with Kissinger, ‘in poor form: bitter at the attacks on him from his own side and indignant over William Shawcross’s vendetta against him’, or suffering, like Heath, ‘from post-power frustration’. His observations of Henry and Nancy Kissinger are among his better examples of the higher gossip: I am reading Kissinger’s book with intense pleasure ...”

“... and Mr Round to be no gentleman’ is also in a tone not characteristic of his biographer. The broad conceptual sweeps that went into writing ‘The Political Creed of Thomas Cromwell’ are also ones in which Maitland did not much indulge. Where the two historians are closest is in their picture of Parliaments, what they were, and what they were for, and ...”

“... at the time, one can sometimes imagine him as a young Anglo-Saxon, rather like the narrator in William Gerhardie’s novel Futility, standing unobtrusively to the side of the action, a little in love with the lives he’s describing and at the same time worried about these people on whom so many difficulties have been inflicted, his grandmother ...”

“... particularly science-fiction fans, but Hubbard assured them he was interpreting religion in broad, humanist terms: ‘Before you say, “Religion, grrrr,” think of that – it is a practical religion and religion is the oldest heritage that Man has.’ Urban does not argue, as other writers have, that it was all a financial ploy, though he agrees that ...”

“... house in suburban Cheshire, most of my pocket money went on books – Billy Bunter, Jennings, William, War Picture Library, Biggles, Arthur Ransome, bird books. In the 1950s I used to order Puffin books by post from the catalogue, the pleasure of unwrapping the parcel rivalling the discovery of a new book in a Christmas stocking. For my ninth or tenth ...”