“... my passport did they seem to accept, with reluctance, that I had a booking. I was given a key and took my own bag upstairs. The room was a cramped, overfurnished space with thin brown walls. On the desk was an envelope of conference materials including a laminated pass on a lanyard and a printed programme. It was at that point that I realised I had been ...”

“... helps explain why Bevis Hillier has written an enormous biography of a dead English minor poet. John Betjeman: New Fame, New Love is the second volume of Hillier’s proposed trilogy and covers, roughly, the years 1933-58, the period when Betjeman, as Larkin put it, ‘became Betjeman’. The book is 736 pages long. Its predecessor, Young Betjeman, was 477 ...”

“... succeeded the popular hero Andrew Jackson in the White House. Who could become excited by John Tyler, Millard Fillmore or Franklin Pierce? The Senate chamber, by contrast, was inhabited by giants, notably the ‘great triumvirate’ of John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, as well as eloquent spokesmen on ...”

“... It is one thing to have your history* record that the firm’s founder – like Bodley Head’s John Lane – tried to avoid paying his authors. It would be quite another to have it alleged that the present management had inherited those proclivities. The distinguished journalist J.W. Lambert was certainly thorough and honest, but for the later ...”

“... What went to form the Christian culture which Reichenau symbolises? Everyone knows that it took the careful preservation of Early Christian beliefs and practices through the so-called Dark Ages, and the maintenance along with them of the remnants of Classical civilisation, to create the possibility of ‘Europe’, conceived as a Christian continuation ...”

“... Nash Sovremennik was flooded with letters of support, while the term ‘Russophobia’ immediately took hold in the polemics of the warring literary factions. The popularity of Shafarevich’s essay as a rallying-point for beleaguered Russian nationalists is easy to appreciate. It joined such famous works as Pushkin’s ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’ as a ...”

“... he also severed the veins in his ankles and behind the knees, dictated a sermon (later published), took poison from a doctor friend, was lowered into a warm bath and finally suffocated in a steam-bath. The point of recounting all this was not, however, to prove that the historian had any more knowledge of what actually happened than Gerrit van Honthorst, the ...”

“... not buried or buried but not remembered, was more like a basement than a pantheon. So the nation took its atavism elsewhere: to places like Stoke Poges, where Thomas Gray was buried in the churchyard he’d made legendary, and especially to Stratford, sanctified by the grave of Shakespeare. This argument about nationalism isn’t watertight, since it was ...”

“... author of The History of British India.’ The father-author thus announced at the beginning of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography dominated his life from early childhood on. Did he in any sense author his son’s life as he authored his books? John Stuart Mill wrote his own Life in large part to work out an answer to ...”

“... who describe 17th-century England as a country ridden with class hatred, but 1688 bore it out. John Miller’s Seeds of Liberty, although emphasising the dependence of the Revolution on its acceptance by a broad and well-informed political nation, concedes that the nobles led and the people followed. A hundred years later the principle of deference looked ...”

“... But probably even the Japanese kamikaze pilots felt they were just doing a job, at least when they took off. Hynes describes one such attack, shortly before the war ended.   The whole lasted perhaps fifteen minutes. We were excited by it – perhaps entertained is a more precise word – it was a spectacle, like a son et lumière, with ...”

“... her first love. She was not yet 18 when Gabriel’s friend and fellow art student James Collinson took an interest in her. A quiet, meek little chap from a philistine Midlands family, he was to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood for a while, hover between Anglicanism and Catholicism, and paint rather good genre pictures, the chief of which, St Elizabeth of ...”

“... between O’Connell and Parnell saw the creation, in fitful stages, of an Irish electorate which took to the practice of voting with as much gusto as it had previously engaged in riot and rebellion, but without ever actually abandoning such tactics. The traditional irredentist belief that when peaceful means do not secure the redress of grievances rapidly ...”

“... thirty, after the painful break-up of a love affair, he disposed of his few personal possessions, took the necessary vow of poverty and resolved to be a writer. He moved from Suffolk to Earlsfield in South-West London to live ‘above a small shop on Garratt Lane that had been by turns an outlet for oversized naughty clothes for transvestites, a West Indian ...”

“... observe that Acmeism, the literary movement which he helped to found in 1910 in St Petersburg, took as the inspiration for its poetry the whole European cultural tradition. The particular ideas and ideals to which Mandelstam was referring, though naturally associated with pan-European Jewish culture, are just as much a part of the best German and Russian ...”