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“... unwelcome to Henry, and led, as he saw it, to a break in church history. During the reign of Edward I, ‘the bishops of Saint Andrews and Glasgow were not as they now be archbishops, but recognised the province of our archbishop of York, which extended over all that country.’ Is it any wonder that the Venetian historian Sabellicus ‘calleth Scotland ...”

“... and Lord Kilmarnock used their last moments together to dismiss the idea that Prince Charles Edward Stuart, their ‘bonnie prince’, could have signed such an order. They both ‘vehemently denied’ it before they walked to the scaffold. Whether Cumberland himself was aware of the forgery, or even arranged it, is not known.The duke was disconcertingly ...”

“... own boredom and futility that they could be comprehended in one glance.’ Comprehended by whom? Edward P. Jones is unfashionably interested in fate and endings, and likes to gaze at the wide horizons of his characters’ extinctions. His remarkable novel, The Known World (2003), owes something to The Mayor of Casterbridge: in it he broods knowingly, like ...”

“... essays of Section One are about the voice of innocence: he truculently pays tribute to his young father and to Henry Ford on their hopeless Oscar II expedition. ‘Ford perceived that war is murder,’ he asserts. (A more cautious writer might have preferred ‘supposed’ to ‘perceived’.) He demands respect for those American eccentrics who were ...”

“... Reign of Love’ – was replaced by that of ‘Bloody Bill’ Marsden, an outstanding sadist. The young Hogg, as Lewis puts it, ‘co-operated enthusiastically in Marsden’s disciplinary reforms’. What can that mean? That he flogged smaller boys with a passion rare even in that intensely homoerotic environment? And his only redeeming feature, his ...”

“... right-wing. Both authors write of their profound respect for one of their former bosses, George K. Young. Young, who died recently, was deputy head of MI6 until he joined the merchant bankers Kleinwort Benson in 1961. One of the very few revelations in George Blake’s book is a memorandum which George ...”

“... the matters described. The record is relatively immune from this difficulty until 1950, when the young Wedgwood Benn was elected in a by-election for Bristol South-East to succeed the ailing Stafford Cripps. Up to this point the story is told in family correspondence, from which a complicated but largely sympathetic figure emerges. As the ‘baby of the ...”

“... groundbreaking biography, published a decade ago, Thomas Corns and Gordon Campbell argued that the young John Milton was not, as he has often been portrayed, a born radical. Instead, they argued, before 1637 the young Milton was politically and religiously conservative, a member of the Church of England who supported the ...”

“... In the mid-1570s they entered Elizabeth’s court under the tutelage of Sidney’s father. With Edward Dyer the young friends formed that ‘happy trinity’ of poets, Sidney Striving with my mates in song, Mixing mirth our songs among. In 1577, the all too early peak of Sidney’s political career, Greville accompanied ...”

“... recruited through provincial grammar schools’. This question supplies the chief interest of Edward Pearce’s biography of John Major, a book sympathetic to its subject which – except at the end – lacks the author’s admirable blend of fun and savage indignation. John Major is a prime minister about whom so far we know virtually nothing except how ...”

“... are two stories here, the public and the private one. The public story should have gone like this: young, fair-haired Guards officer, keen as mustard, goes to the wars, performs deeds of derring-do, is badly wounded, shipped – and flown – home to a hero’s welcome. But the hero’s welcome was missing. The walking wounded were greeted at RAF Brize Norton ...”

“... a no-nonsense, suck-it-and-see anti-intellectualism. For socialist playwrights like John Arden and Edward Bond, the consequence, in one case, is external and in the other a form of internal exile. But the most noted instance of the prophet rejecting his own country is the director Peter Brook who, having forged a glittering career in the British theatre, from ...”

“... African Government is complete and damning. The following questions are asked on the jacket of Dr Edward Smithies’s book. What did criminals do during the war? How did they meet the challenges of conscription, the black-out, rationing, austerity? How did the Police cope? Understaffed but overburdened with work? What happened to juvenile delinquency, that ...”

“... his grandmother, but not to any of his siblings, displaced as they were around the plantation.As a young boy he was stoical and resourceful. He had a habit of singing outside the window of Lucretia Auld, his owner’s daughter – a ploy she ‘very soon came to understand as a petition for a piece of bread’. He was exposed to countless acts of brutality: a ...”