“... of Northern Irish history has, however, come from post-Althusserian scholars like Paul Bew, Peter Gibbon and Henry Patterson,* and their work on the class dynamics of Unionism, as well as the nature of Southern nationalism, leads to very different conclusions: Struggles over the status of the North are no more automatically anti-imperialist than crimes ...”

“... His father, General Vladimir de Staël von Holstein, was vice-governor of the Fortress of St Peter and St Paul, where famous liberals had been incarcerated at the Tsar’s pleasure. His mother came from a more cultivated family, and was related to the composer Glazunov. At the outbreak of the Revolution in 1917, the family was compelled to leave ...”

“... and his refusal to peddle scientistic obscurities when everyday language was perfectly adequate. Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees takes a similar line when it comes to describing the behaviour of trees, but unlike de Waal Wohlleben is not a professional scientist. He is a forester who has worked with scientists, and it is his decades-long ...”

“... Wordsworth for most would be impossible. To Shelley he seemed ‘a solemn and unsexual man’ (‘Peter Bell the Third’), and even the revelation early in this century that he had a French girlfriend, and French illegitimate daughter, has not altered the stuffy public image of Victorian Poet Laureate and sage of Rydal Mount. If anything can change this ...”

“... 2 Willow Road was presented to the National Trust in the mid-1990s, it was Henry Brooke’s son Peter, the heritage secretary, who performed the ceremony. Ernö Goldfinger’s professional life was full of such ironies. By the 1970s, he was a misrepresented figure, demonised (he felt) for his part in the high rise architectural attack on London. His wish to ...”

“... the ruling party had already chosen its candidates. I almost felt sorry for the smiling face of Peter Odili. British audiences may remember him as the governor of Rivers State in the Niger Delta, Nigeria’s richest state: last year he entertained a Channel 4 film crew in his throne room with Cristal champagne, which costs more per bottle than the large ...”

“... the salaries and places in its gift’. They issued scurrilous leaflets during the 1911 Bethnal Green by-election, which Masterman narrowly won, and joined the Daily Express in smearing him again in 1914, when he lost two by-elections (one after being appointed to the cabinet). The New Witness crowed that Masterman, as the lackey of ‘Lloyd George … the ...”

“... Photographs of the town of Suzdal, taken almost a century apart, show few signs of change: green fields and low wooden houses still surround the Intercession Convent, with no evidence of a Soviet imprint. The new industrial centre of Yaroslavl was built to the west of the old city, so the religious buildings photographed by Brumfield are still bordered ...”

“... little immediate recollection of where it had once been headed. A lengthy shot of a beige and dark green patchwork quilt of fields corrugated by ploughing reminded me of the irregular hatchings in Paul Klee’s notebooks. These were his attempt to explain what it might mean to speak of the freedom of the ‘active’ line in art. ‘The primordial ...”

“... Milton’s ‘Areopagitica’ – ‘the mansion-house of liberty’ – or in ‘Comus’, ‘the green shops’. On the one hand, therefore, the loyalist imagination – ‘linen decency’ and ‘a stark and dead congealment’ – and on the other a generous variety of poetic practices, ‘republican industry’ he calls them as a whole, that free the ...”

“... It’s nine o’clock but they are still haymaking above Eldroth, the newly-mown fields fresh and green. Then down into Giggleswick to a silly supper and a game of Trivial Pursuit. To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy. London. To supper at the Camden Brasserie. It’s a hot night and the shutters have been ...”

“... law and medicine. Prominent Lebanese Americans like Ralph Nader, Michael DeBakey, William Peter Blatty, Senator James Abourezk and General John Abizaid rarely visited Lebanon itself. As attached as some were to their grandmothers’ cooking and to bits of folklore, they preferred to keep the country at a distance. Anthony Shadid was an exception. As ...”

“... there may sometimes be good justification for studying the limited population, as there was for Peter Marris in his Widows and their Families of 1958: Marris was specifically concerned with the economic as well as the emotional needs of widows in what was still the closely-knit community of Bethnal Green. Parkes has no ...”

“... he and Romana kept an open house where George Harrison first met Ravi Shankar and the actor Peter Eyre remembered seeing Barbra Streisand talking to Jonathan Miller, who liked to ‘arse around’ doing sketches while McEwen played. The party carried on later in Scotland, where on his brother’s death McEwen bought Bardrochat, the other family ...”

“... 2). One important development illustrates nicely that odd relationship between guide and history. Peter Cunningham had followed his guide to Westminster Abbey of 1842 with a two-volume historical Handbook of London, which went through two editions in 1849-1850. It was an outstanding work and H.B. Wheatley based his London Past and Present on it in ...”