“... interested in Taylor’s more orthodox poems, which he valued, as would any good friend of Sir Walter Scott, as a source of quaint details about everyday life in Jacobean London. Malcolm’s proposal of an unbroken, overarching historical trajectory of nonsense stretching from the Renaissance to the Victorians looks equally shaky in the other ...”

“... history, having originated in the imaginations of German scientists during the Second World War. Walter Dornberger, a favourite of Hitler who oversaw the V2 rocket programme and its extensive slave labour workforce, emigrated to the US after the war and soon found employment in the arms industry. In the 1950s he presented the US air force with a proposal for ...”

“... salaries were introduced in 1911. The main aim was to prevent destabilising radical initiatives. Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution (1867), the most famous defence of parliamentary government, was quite explicit about that. Written during a fervent campaign for parliamentary reform, it was intended as a warning against the implementation of abstract ...”

“... SEAL and a special assistant for national security at the Obama White House. It had a foreword by Walter Isaacson, then head of the Aspen Institute, which receives substantial funding from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and has been described by the Economist as ‘a cross between a think tank, a celebrity summer camp and a liberal arts ...”

“... world of administration’, was a different species from Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, or even George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham; and the title of her essay puts the question ‘can a bureaucrat be a favourite?’ And what made a favourite? Cecil began at the top, schooled by his father in a long and carefully recorded apprenticeship. But Sir Christopher ...”

“... With the advent of Richard Nixon, who sought the segregationist vote by emulating some of George Wallace’s worst traits, all this changed. Wallace had campaigned against ‘pointy-headed bureaucrats’ and Nixon derided government workers, though they kept the Government going during Watergate. The lure these days is the lucrativeness of having ...”

“... by his own argument, for ‘Austen readers tend to identify themselves as rereaders.’ Ever since George Henry Lewes, in his long and laudatory essay in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1859, referred to those ‘like ourselves’ who ‘have read and reread her works’, rereading has been the declared pleasure of all Austen admirers. Lewes had counted his readings ...”

“... education. Their family home at Gidea Hall, near Romford, was described by the Cambridge scholar Walter Haddon as a ‘little university’, and here they learned Greek, Latin, French and Italian, plus a smattering of Hebrew. They were ‘all most eminent scholars … learned above their sex’, Thomas Fuller wrote in his Worthies of England, displaying the ...”

“... media eminences, which, according to a list released by the revolutionaries in 1979, included Walter Cronkite, Barbara Walters, Peter Jennings and Mrs Arthur Sulzberger. Emboldened by this support, the previously timid shah manifested signs of the syndrome al-Afghani had identified in one of his predecessors: ‘However bizarre it may seem, it is ...”

“... Some had military experience, though it wasn’t always the useful kind: ‘Manchester volunteer Walter Greenhalgh, for example, had served in the Territorial Army, but had done so as a drummer and the value of his expertise was probably limited.’ Many were veterans of the 1931 naval mutiny at Invergordon, or the hunger marches of the early 1930s, or the ...”

“... the age of 28. His fiancée, May of Teck, married his younger brother Georgie, who would reign as George V after his father’s death. And so Albert’s line continued. Bertie didn’t mend his ways; but contrary to Albert’s fears, the consequences for world politics weren’t too dreadful. Walter Bagehot wrote in The ...”

“... gave up his original plan of a career in the Church, also knew William Godwin and Coleridge. George, the only one of the brothers whose portrait survives, has a look of the latter about him with his long hair and slightly abstracted gaze. All the brothers travelled widely and spoke and read several languages. When they were at home they entertained ...”

“... decidedly modern, often with racy connotations. When Edward Prince of Wales asked his father, George V, if he could have the use of Fort Belvedere at Windsor the king was surprised: ‘What could you possibly want that queer old place for? Those damn week-ends I suppose.’ He caved in and perhaps regretted it, for the weekends with their associated ...”

“... detected a fellow-traveller of the Calvinist International in the 16th-century polymath George Buchanan, an Erasmian humanist who went on to adopt the cladding of Scots Calvinism at its most dour, but without, it appeared, possessing any of the inner belief. Buchanan – in later life the bloodthirsty but effective tutor of the young James VI ...”

“... forging a ‘hero image of Castro, in which all the virtues of Robin Hood and Thomas Jefferson, of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, were contained in a single man’. Matthews’s series caused an uproar in Cuba: Batista himself was enraged by it, and one of his top advisers dismissed Matthews’s reporting as ‘a chapter in a fantastic ...”