“... and reworked by middle-class men with sexual anxieties of their own. ‘A Night in a Workhouse’, John Addington Symonds recalled, ‘brought the emotional tumour which was gathering within me to maturity,’ inspiring him to write a long passionate poem about cross-class love between men, including a section entitled ‘Kay’. Were the sexual ...”

“... leaves the impression that the country’s territorial expansion on the North American continent took place largely through peaceful settlement and the purchase of land, Anderson and Cayton emphasise the centrality of military conquest. They are nothing if not ambitious. Their aim in The Dominion of War is to dismantle what they call the traditional ‘grand ...”

“... itself. The infamous ‘war guilt’ clause was right: Germany together with Austria-Hungary took the decision to start a war in the Balkans and to accept the risk that war in the Balkans would set off a wider European one. At the time, and in retrospect, it was folly. Russia had made it clear that, having backed off on earlier occasions, it would ...”

“... physically identical but morally distinct men swap lives. Not only does the unattached but lonely John find himself forced into the complex identity of his alter ego, Count Jean de Gué, but his physical resemblance to de Gué’s mother and daughter bestows a past and a future on him, drawing him into the human chain. Taken to extremes, such permeability ...”

“... happened? Either he was not in the castle at the time (as he asserted), or, if he was, the murder took place without his knowledge. Curiously, Mortimer himself thinks that this might have been the case with the man he supposes was dispatched in Edward’s place: ‘it is by no means impossible,’ he writes in the EHR article, that the murderers ‘were ...”

“... insulate the reader from everyday life just as surely as writing them had done for him. So writing took up most of his time. The only problem was that he also had a wife and two children, one of whom, Lucia, he seemed more intent on gathering into his art than recognising as a person in her own right. Or rather, if Carol Loeb Shloss’s account is to be ...”

“... accounts of enlightened enquiry. Unlike Dava Sobel’s popular caricature of the clockmaker John Harrison, for example, Pancaldi’s carefully characterised Volta was not a solitary persecuted genius hunting the solution to the great scientific problem of his time. Other equally ludicrous fables of the progress of science and technology tell us that the ...”

“... firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’ The colonel does remember the ice when he faces the firing squad and he remembers it just before he dies. But these are separate memory-events, and what the colonel doesn’t do is what the sentence most clearly seems to promise: die ...”

“... chancer whose great fortune was accumulated as much by the successful outcomes to the risks he took as by his hard work and lively intuition’ – was a man who could resist his ‘inherited background’; and who retired in 1898 at the age of 51 ‘stupendously rich’. (‘It would be idle to speculate on how much money he was worth.’) This, as ...”

“... the total traffic. The three French Caribbean colonies (Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue) took in as many slaves as all of Spanish America, and Martinique alone imported more slaves than all the US states combined, excluding Louisiana. Saint-Domingue became the richest colony in the world, and French involvement grew quickly until, between 1781 and ...”

“... get what you pay for. Each concept has acquired constitutional legitimacy in its time – for, as John Griffith famously observed, the constitution is what happens. So when you pick up The New British Constitution and ask what new constitution that might be, one answer is that the British constitution, because it is always changing, is always new. But the ...”

“... ending in time to run it off on Thursday morning. This is the world Wenger inherited when he took over as Arsenal manager. After the announcement in August 1996, the headline on the back page of the Daily Mirror ran: ‘Arsène Who?’ In his new autobiography, Wenger describes his first match as manager: ‘On 12 October 1996, I was no longer in the ...”

“... to misunderstand its intentions. They knew how dangerous a weapon the U-boat had proved to be, and took it for granted that Germany would use it again. The Admiralty worked hard on anti-submarine weapons and tactics, and prepared to build a large class of anti-submarine vessels called ‘corvettes’. But there was a puzzling discrepancy between what they ...”

“... of the Falkland Islands by Argentina in 1982, they found that the relevant file was missing. It took 12 years for the advice given by the Foreign Office’s legal adviser Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice to the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax on the day of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939 to surface:The Secretary of State’s enquiry about how ...”

“... were watching and the books they were reading. Lera: Françoise Sagan, Iris Murdoch, Susan Hill, John Updike (‘pointless’), Evelyn Waugh (‘black and unreadable’), Yuri Trifonov, the Kyrgyz author Chinghiz Aitmatov, books on yoga. Harold: mostly 19th-century classics, but also ‘one modern book a week’. The families exchanged presents: from England ...”