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“... of George Gudger: Freshly laundered cotton gauze underwear. Mercerised blue green socks, held up over his fist-like calves by scraps of pink and green gingham rag. Long bulb-toed black shoes: still shining with the glaze of their first newness, streaked with clay. Trousers of a hard and cheap cotton-wool, dark blue with narrow grey stripes; a ...”

“... Their Word or Ours?’ (the most original contribution to the volume edited by David Childs), the term ‘Eurocommunism’ constitutes in the first place a resource in the ideological repertoire of certain commentators who are vehemently opposed to the arrival in power, for purposes of serious social transformation, of any Communist Party ...”

“... Party had kept secret during its uninterrupted period in power from 1948. The Labour patriarch David Ben-Gurion had called Begin a ‘Jewish Hitler’. Begin, a zealot but a legalist, had called Ben-Gurion’s extension of the repressive British Defence Regulations, although enforced mainly against Israel’s Arabs, ‘Nazi laws’ and vowed to resist ...”

“... The ‘writer’ – really a speaker – repeats testimony into a microphone nestled in a hand-held mask that prevents her voice from being heard in court; the recording is later transcribed, usually with speech-recognition software. The Stenomask dates back to the 1940s, when an American court reporter encased a microphone first in a cigar-box, then in a ...”

“... hunting ground for the bogus and the meretricious’. It was, as Pearson says, a belief widely held in Tory circles: the social sciences, they felt, lacked rigour as a discipline, producing results ‘everybody knew’. In 1982 the Social Science Research Council, the SSRC, had its name changed to ESRC, to emphasise economics over ...”

“... to visit the animals: ‘Meet your brothers, take them to your hearts and respect them.’ But as David Hancocks colourfully describes, most precursors of the modern zoo have been the opposite of this, from the circuses of Rome to the travelling menageries of the 18th and 19th centuries, shuttered in so that passers-by got no free view; and as he says (and I ...”

“... the hobnailed boot can be wielded with just as much delicacy and skill as the épée, once said of David Owen that the Good Fairy who attended his birth had generously bestowed upon him the three qualities of charm, intelligence and good looks. He is then reported to have added: ‘What a pity that the Bad Fairy made him a shit.’ This is a pretty cruel thing ...”

“... brings about a substantial (and welcome) reduction by referring only to some two hundred thousand. David Chandler explains that ever since he wrote his excellent book on the campaigns of Napoleon ten years ago, he has been inundated by requests for further information coming from the widest possible variety of people, all of whom are, as he puts it, ‘caught ...”

“... divide. The Blackwood set were Tories in a city run by Whigs. To harry the Whig establishment that held Scottish public life in its somnolent grasp: this was the paper’s political mission. If the northern stronghold of ‘whiggery and infidelity’ was the Edinburgh Review, then Blackwood’s would muster its forces under the ‘twin banners of sound ...”

“... that draw on the Bible. Joseph Heller’s God Knows sets itself up as the memoir of the ageing David – ‘warrior king, the sweet psalmist of Israel’ – and plays off its contemporary idiom against an ancient story for cheap laughs. David reminisces without ever losing a sense of his audience; with a wink to the ...”

“... had to do with public affairs, was misplaced. The landed aristocracy regained its ascendancy and held it through most of the 19th century at the moderate cost of persuading middle-class voters and administrators to act in its interests. For a short span of years it had looked as if great changes might occur. In earlier periods of such fluidity permanent ...”

“... more extreme. The charitable impulses of Dorchester’s citizens were, at the same time, stirred. David Underdown has discovered in Dorchester an outpouring of philanthropy on an extraordinary scale, unrivalled in England. Here was a town of only 2500 inhabitants which gave, in the fight for Christ against Antichrist, £150 for the defence of their ...”

“... workshop of the world’ and the supposedly pacific attitudes of its burgeoning middle classes held much greater sway. But the British of the 1850s were just as worked up about the French as their grandfathers had been. Bands of Volunteers formed themselves all over the place with hardly any official encouragement or subsidy – and somewhat to the ...”

“... politics, then? Not exactly. ‘He was his party’s most fertile ideas man at Westminster since David Lloyd George, perhaps since Gladstone,’ Barberis blurts out in his final section, almost as though he has just thought of it, reassuring himself by adding: ‘That is what he was – an ideas man, not a political philosopher or even the careful crafter of ...”

“... before the Reformation, The Stripping of the Altars, they have now made things even with David Daniell’s William Tyndale. Tyndale’s life is soon told. He was born, probably in 1494, of a landowning and entrepreneurial family in that part of Gloucestershire where the Cotswolds meet the Severn, since then the home of Evelyn Waugh (temporarily: the ...”