“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... from a manual art to a liberal one’.Hilliard’s self-portrait can also be compared with one by George Gower, painted in 1579. Gower was a slightly older contemporary and to some extent a rival of Hilliard: he would be named the queen’s ‘serjeant painter’ in 1581, though the holder of this post was chiefly employed as a painterdecorator. Gower’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s writings on ‘Nation Language’, George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack, Monkey and Austin Clarke’s Growing Up Stupid under the Union Jack, among others. Much like these precursors, Brand is transformed from a conformist child of empire into a radical critic ...”

“... family was wary; important witnesses to her life were squeamish about providing testimony. George Bernard Shaw announced that ‘as Edith was an audaciously unconventional lady and Hubert an exceedingly unfaithful husband he does not see how a presentable biography is possible as yet; and he has nothing to contribute to a mere whitewashing ...”

“... lobbies. This, rather than anything to do with Irangate, is the real reason why that CIA Director, George Bush, would probably be no improvement on Reagan as President, and could well be worse. There is little doubt that the fundamental force which put Reagan into office was a growing sense of public unease at American imperial decline. (Already in 1976 Gerald ...”

“... shift in historical consciousness which elsewhere produced the work of Edward Gibbon and Sir Walter Scott, which makes Malone’s work so important. At the same time, however, it is also what makes his work so confined in critical scope, since for him it makes virtually any critical activity beyond the provision of historical and linguistic glosses seem ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as oil supplies are a legitimate concern for an American president. Imagine what would happen if George W. – or any other American president bent on intervention in the Middle East – not only said he wasn’t concerned with America’s oil supplies but actually meant it. Hyam and Henshaw write sensitively and with great perspicacity about the pretend ...”

“... small town in Pennsylvania who tries to explain to a reporter that he and his neighbours voted for George Bush in 2000 because they were ‘tired of moral decay’, ‘tired of everything being wonderful on Wall Street and terrible on Main Street’. ‘Let me repeat that,’ Frank writes incredulously: ‘They’re voting Republican in order to get even with ...”

“... the mysteries of the everyday. When Jennings assembled a collection of M-O ‘day reports’ on George VI’s coronation, published under the title May the Twelfth, he was sure it marked the beginning of an entirely new form of literature. He thought of the methods of Mass-Observation less as sociology than as a kind of poetry, one which, in Roland ...”

“... 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 ...”