“... and marry bitches.’ White’s war in the North African desert was dreary on the whole, but it took him to Alexandria where, in July 1941, he met Manoly Lascaris, ‘this small Greek of immense moral strength, who became the central mandala of my life’s hitherto messy design’. Forty years later they are still together. When the war ended White wanted ...”

“... the year but Gaitskell had divided his party for ten. That was almost certainly not necessary. It took Wilson and Marcia Falkender to put it, for a time, together again. At Health, Macleod was a success, too much so for Vaizey’s taste, because he let dental assistants scale teeth, built more hospitals, and secured acceptance for the Guillebaud Report. In ...”

“... and surveillance. Refined in the crucible of war, the centralised, bureaucratic state first took a recognisably modern shape in 17th and 18th-century Europe and showed the rest of the world ‘the image of its own future’. As Charles Tilly has put it, ‘war made the state, and the state made war.’ But how (and when and where) did war make the ...”

“... national protest at the stockholding leeches who, he claimed, were sucking the lifeblood from John Bull. At times of economic tension over the following twenty years, the fundholder and the landowner competed to be the most vilified vested interest in the country. But from mid-century, unimagined national prosperity, assisted by Peelite finance, changed ...”

“... Indian teams had to be captained by whites. The most notorious example was the reappointment of John Goddard to lead the tour of England in 1957 over the obviously superior claims of Frank Worrell. This particular anomaly led directly to defeat, and had its share in the disaster at Edgbaston in the first test, when Ramadhin was required to bowl 98 ...”

“... years. After King’s Cross the London Transport chiefs not only stuck close to their office, but took the opportunity to make it clear that the cuts in staff would continue. In Thatcher’s Britain, you need a disaster or two to prove you do not flinch from the gruelling demands of free enterprise. ‘Disaster Woman’ – yes, especially in 1987, when in ...”

“... was all emotional rapids and sinkholes). It was she who suggested the Transglobe expedition, which took seven years to prepare and three years to execute. ‘Mad and suitably British’ was the Prince of Wales’s description of the much-bally-hooed voyage of the Benjamin Bowring. In between the set-pieces of Pole-bashing eight sales exhibitions were staged in ...”

“... is the Palladian Chapel which Fanny Burney described as ‘a Pantheon in miniature’. Designed by John Tasker for Thomas Weld and made by Italian craftsmen in 1792, this is widely known as the first free-standing Catholic church to be built in England after the Reformation. Meanwhile Saint Andrews, the old village church from which Weld bones were removed to ...”

“... mid-Atlantic accents instead of Alcott’s Yankee vernacular. Laurie’s grandfather is played by John Neville, and the scenes, whether meant for Concord, Boston or New York, have that interchangeable Merchant/Ivory, Masterpiece Theatre look. The Anglo-American effect isn’t totally off base. Both ‘Marmee’ and Louisa herself thought of the Alcott sisters ...”

“... and dismal out. As we walked down to the centre to see what was happening, a child of about six took one look at me with my hood up and sunglasses on and said categorically: ‘It’s way past your bedtime.’ Suitably chastised, I resolved to take it a lot easier that day. Many people, it seemed, felt the same.Saturday day was accordingly spent uncovering ...”

“... Cruickshank, Rowlandson and Dent; and portrayed by Romney, Beechey, Hoppner, Matthew Peters and John Russell. Nor has she been entirely forgotten by posterity. To be sure, she was not even mentioned by name in Percy Fitzgerald’s two-volume life of King William IV, published in 1884. But she merited an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, there ...”

“... hardly believe that anyone but an acrobat could control a high-wheeler. Mounting his horse, he took to accompanying an English high-cycling friend around Boston and was outdistanced every time. There is a picture strip showing the author of this book mounting a penny-farthing, achieving legover after a skilful ascent from the rear; which is how elderly ...”

“... of climatic change. This tradition has been continued recently among Anglophone historians by John Pryor’s analysis of how the patterns of weather, winds, currents and coastal topography in the Mediterranean shaped its economic and military history, by Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World and by the work of Donald Worster and Alfred Crosby. If ...”

“... leathery but perfectly-formed C. P.-B. She unveiled her adulterous passion with the Hewitt. She took leave to doubt that her ex-husband-elect was fit for the throne. Excuse me, but didn’t I know all this already? Nothing on Carling was offered, or asked for by the fawning Bashir, and nothing on young James Gilbey of the ‘Squidgy’ tapes either. And she ...”

“... There was firepower enough to mash up a vast landscape and wreck the water table, but it still took hundreds of rounds to kill one man. Most of the book deals with the shifting battle tactics of Gough and General Sir Herbert Plumer, who commanded the Second Army, as seen from command level (a good overall map of the entire Western Front would have been a ...”