“... in first class, and the hopes of the dispossessed in steerage. The Titanic was a ship of fools. As John Wilson Foster tells us, the grand staircase came in William and Mary style, though the balustrade was Louis XIV; the first-class dining saloon and reception rooms were Jacobean, the restaurant Louis XVI, the lounge Louis XV (Versailles), the reading and ...”

“... the agenda for much of Italian national life, both public and private. In the early 1960s, Pope John XXIII’s famous encyclicals, Mater et magistra (1961) and Pacem in Terris (1963), together with his summoning of the Second Vatican Council, produced great ferment in the Catholic world. But the radical tide ebbed, and the long and powerful pontificate of ...”

“... Rice); and a few celebrated statements about the duties and limitations of democracy by John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Adams’s 1821 Independence Day address to the House of Representatives was delivered while he was secretary of state in the administration of James Monroe. A sceptic ...”

“... And the lead role has attracted all the dashers over the years, from Gerald du Maurier through John Barrymore and Ronald Colman to David Niven. I particularly enjoyed the Yorkshire TV series in the 1970s, with Anthony Valentine as a notably suave and sinister Raffles and Christopher Strauli as a frightened Bunny. The combination of mannered elegance and ...”

“... Brecht’s work in its setting (sacrilege can come later), the starting-point still has to be John Willett’s The New Sobriety 1917-33: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period.1 This marvellously illustrated book takes us through all the bitter political and cultural history, from the aborted revolt of the returning soldiers in 1918, the killing of ...”

“... on to accuse the English of betraying their precious inheritance. The rot began, he said, with John Stuart Mill, who started off as a liberal but went on to swallow a toxic draught of German metaphysics and then succumbed to the feminist wiles of Harriet Taylor, who married him and led him astray. Under Taylor’s tutelage, it seems, Mill ‘slid slowly ...”

“... for Israel, reputedly ‘good’ with black people, he is moreover young and once shook hands with John F. Kennedy. At the bar of the Sheraton Wayfarer in Manchester, the HQ of the travelling press corps, most correspondents report that their editors only want good news about the new consensus candidate. And, generally, that’s what they have been getting and ...”

“... Qabbala, or even claim to have inspected and made sense of the symbolism of the Revelations of St John of Patmos. Dukes was also sexually attracted to Stone – or Stone had been born yesterday if Dukes was not. Dukes had terribly vulnerable eyes which when they were hurt would fade over and grow misted with an affecting desolation. It takes a desperate man ...”

“... Hannen, President of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division of the Court of Appeal; and Sir John Day and Sir Archibald Levin Smith, both from the High Court: ‘Unionists to a man,’ as Roy Jenkins describes them in his Life of Gladstone. But what were these judges thinking of, presiding over a tribunal to which none of the ordinary rules applied, set ...”

“... in the Falklands War earlier that year. The unions’ postwar heyday was already over. Further laws followed in 1984, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1990 and 1992. Often euphemistically called Employment Acts, the new laws first restricted or ended the unions’ most expansive powers: the closed shop, which made union membership ...”

“... and teachers. Not since the publication of the central texts of the modern history of slavery, John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom in 1947 and Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution in 1956, has any serious history book claimed that slavery was a benign paternalistic institution. No one has argued that it was anything other than the great ...”

“... in which the King’s Secretary issued a warrant authorising two messengers to enter the home of John Entick and search for seditious papers. There was neither common law nor statutory authority for this action, which Entick successfully challenged in the courts, recovering damages from the hapless messengers (said to be ‘as much responsible as their ...”

“... awash with Dante translations: Laurence Binyon’s in the Thirties, Dorothy Sayers’s in 1949, John Ciardi’s in 1955, Mark Musa’s in 1971, C.H. Sisson’s in 1980, not to mention an Inferno by assorted poets broadcast by the BBC’s Third Programme in 1961, the prose versions by John Sinclair and Charles ...”

“... Abbey’ as a ‘post-revolutionary’ work. Roe argues the poem is haunted by the spirit of John Thelwall, the radical orator who was extremely popular in the 1790s and to whom Roe’s book is dedicated. In 1798 Thelwall was living a few miles away from Tintern Abbey, having retired from political engagement after the wave of arrests which followed the ...”

“... do it in a man’s shadow, or as a mother. At 26, she dumped Muse, left her son with her in-laws, and went to live, alone, in a cold-water walk-up in midtown. It was a gutsy, if chilly move. Hartigan wouldn’t see her son again for more than thirty years. Curtis does not say it outright – at least, not immediately – but Hartigan was known as a ...”