“... Usage is that it is so much less boring than one might expect – as, indeed, was its author. Henry Fowler was born in 1858, educated at Rugby and Balliol, and worked as a teacher at Sedbergh for 17 years before losing his job in a row over his refusal to prepare boys for Confirmation. Fowler was now 41. He moved to London, where he scratched a living ...”

“... Parliament. Over these centuries it has been the rolling back of ministerial claims to arbitrary power, exercised by the use of the royal prerogative, that has shaped the British constitution.In 1636 a London trader called Richard Chambers sued the mayor for having wrongfully imprisoned him for refusing to pay ship money. His case was that the tax was itself ...”

“... in wartime Sierra Leone finds himself in an almost mathematical bind. It would be a mortal sin for Henry Scobie not to go to Mass with his wife, Louise, but if he does not take Communion when they go, she will suspect that he has been having sex with a young widow. Although he tries the confessional beforehand, he cannot receive absolution because he refuses ...”

“... his leadership was the fact worth paying attention to. It was their insistence – their staying power – that made possible a moment of political alchemy. The unveiling of the Labour manifesto altered the course of the campaign in a way no opinion poll could have predicted – its bold and comprehensive policy offer contrasting sharply with Theresa May’s ...”

“... the past two decades on topics such as Dryden’s triplets, Shakespeare and anagrams, T.S. Eliot, Henry James, Byron, Norman Mailer, Ion Bugan, Samuel Beckett, Geoffrey Hill, and what Ricks argues is the non-distinction between poetry and prose. ‘Any claim to coherence has to be a mild one,’ Ricks says of the volume, since the two subjects, heroism and ...”

“... pirate troop isn’t attributed to physical strength but to a subtler ‘commanding art’: a ‘power of Thought’ that guides and moulds. One way to know that we’re not supposed to like the tyrannical potentates whom the Byronic heroes come up against (beside their sinister Oriental characterisation) is their unthinkingness. ‘I search’d, but vainly ...”

“... catch his eye. ‘You, sir, are a drunkard, and some of you are whoremasters’ (he’s looking at Henry Marten and Sir Peter Wentworth). Then he points to the Speaker up in his chair: ‘Fetch him down.’ When the Speaker doesn’t budge, he shouts, ‘Put him out,’ and a couple of members, rather unwillingly, drag him down, and he is marched out without ...”

“... decided to raise the alarm, it is terrifying to think how ignorant we would now be of the uses of power, and even more terrifying to reflect on the uses that power would have made – nearly did make – of our ignorance. For a week or two in the spring of this year, it seemed that Nixon’s death might kill off the entire ...”

“... Its focus was the economic causes of the war. The conflicting hypotheses about the wealth and power of the aristocracy and gentry, about the waning of feudalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie, and about the relationship of those social forces to the causes and course of the Puritan revolution, provoked an intensity of research and disagreement that has ...”

“... murderer and would-be man of science by the name of Léon Rom); but dismisses the informative power of the novel by baldly asserting that European and American readers have ‘cast it loose from its historical moorings’ – and then producing himself as star witness for his case. When he read it as an undergraduate, he tells us, he ‘mentally filed ...”

“... on the Mexican model. Carr’s upbringing also explains his faith in the Commonwealth as a great power (a ‘great multi-national agglomeration’ to set alongside those of the US and the Soviet Union), which continued in place until after 1945. In Nationalism and After, published in that year, he wrote – in terms which now sound downright touching ...”

“... racially integrated, non-violent movement led by King and a subsequent ‘bad’ one when Black Power became the order of the day and urban uprisings alienated many previously sympathetic whites. Eig makes clear that King was masterful in appealing for support from white Americans by associating the civil rights struggle with cherished documents such as the ...”

“... on 18 September 1905, into a family of storytellers and intellectuals. Her paternal grandfather, Henry de Mille, was an Episcopal minister who became a playwright, one of the theatre producer David Belasco’s first collaborators. He discouraged his sons William and Cecil from going into the theatre but they didn’t listen. William de Mille, Agnes’s ...”

“... Railway Company who had died in the First World War. The guest of honour was Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, who unveiled a memorial in the station’s booking hall. It was marble, seven metres high and eight metres wide, and recorded the names of the 1220 men who had sacrificed their lives ‘in response to the call of their King and Country’. At six ...”

“... published, in Paris, in ‘the early Thirties’, according to its English translator, Michael Henry Heim. It appeared in the émigré journal Numbers and shortly thereafter as a book; fifty years of oblivion later, a copy turned up in a second-hand bookshop and was translated into French, bringing overdue fame to its author. Unfortunately, however, no one ...”