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“... official had told me bluntly that my methods of building popular consent – holding ‘town hall’ meetings with all factions, working with Hamas, shuttling between Palestinians on the ground and President Arafat to ensure broad participation and continued momentum – were passé. We were in a new era, and it required new thinking: ‘The road to ...”

“... some pushy left-wing bitch. In March, Obama had drawn a crowd of ten thousand or so outside City Hall in Oakland, just across the Bay. Last winter Rolling Stones-sized crowds gathered wherever he went: in major cities like LA and Cleveland, middle-sized cities like Austin, and smaller places like Ames, Iowa and Concord, New Hampshire. Earlier in the summer ...”

“... Mirrors (later known as Saint-Gobain) in 1667 and the sensation caused by their masterpiece, the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, in 1682. Cheaper production techniques transformed mirrors from luxuries into necessities. How, precisely, did science influence the history of ideas about the mirror? The shift from the concept of man as mirror of God to God as ...”

“... England’s enduring Catholics would, of course, say that that had always been the case, but if Richard Hooker had lived a hundred years later, not even he would have been able to say with a straight face that membership of the Church of England and of the Commonwealth of England amounted to the same thing. In the next revolution, of 1688-89, attempts at ...”

“... with a gabardine coat he picked up. Unfortunately, he ran into the owner of the coat in a pool hall a few months later, a student who had reported the theft of the coat from Nelson Cleaners and was able to identify a cigarette burn on the hem: the police had their burglar. There are a welter of coincidences and head-to-head encounters in the memoir, Braly ...”

“... waded in to defend their aesthetic value against the ‘Connoisseurs’, notably the taste-maker Richard Payne Knight, who thought them not worth having. Haydon’s high-pitched polemic had the gratifying effect of attracting Goethe’s admiration and the predictable result of so antagonising the Royal Academy that they never admitted him. Keats sat before ...”

“... complex’ in a speech about the death of ‘global Europe’. On the opposite side of the hall, a man from the Danube Institute gave me back copies of the Hungarian Conservative. He had come straight from a US Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest, where Viktor Orbán had called for Donald Trump to be returned to office. There was an ...”

“... have now been revised, expanded and tightened – although the speculative tone of the lecture-hall has been appropriately retained. Many other scholars have recently explored the development of the Church of England over the two long reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, and one of Collinson’s achievements, executed with singular modesty and ...”

“... She thinks her employers are getting suspicious. I counted 62 full mail crates stacked up in the hall when I visited recently. There was a narrow passageway between the wall of crates and her personal pile of stuff: banana boxes, a disused bead curtain, a mop bucket. One of the crates has crept into the study, where the postwoman’s computer rears up out of ...”

“... Greeting’s’. When the bag company refused to replace them staffers at the Town Hall spent hours pasting little pieces of adhesive tape over every offending apostrophe. My contradictory husband, who is sometimes known in his field as Write-it-Wrong Elbow, liberated a few of the apostrophes by pulling off the adhesive tape. 13 January. The ...”

“... the same time – often to dramatic effect; but also a series of stunning temporary exhibitions (Richard III, Samuel Pepys, Cecil Beaton’s photographs) which had ‘the whole of London agog’ and queues of people round Trafalgar Square. These ‘Diaries’ – in fact, partly reworked versions of a variety of ‘jottings’ and more crafted ...”

“... crisis office with its computer screens, scrambled telephones, his chic assistant Fawn Hall, his direct line to the CIA, there was no room for doubt or the comprehension of shifting alliances. Ollie was one of the ‘action people’ who cut through the gridlock of Washington bureacracy. In November 1985, he is discussing with Nir two mysterious ...”

“... and the crumbling of services on a scale that would have gladdened the ruralist heart of a Richard Jefferies. Five years ago, Roy Porter still diagnosed ‘a downward spiral of infrastructural and human problems that will prove hard to halt’. Yet now, when London has slipped way down the table of city-sizes and tours round the eerie magnificence of ...”

“... by the warmth of Rousseau’s gratitude, and Rousseau was briefly exquisitely happy with Wootton Hall in Staffordshire, rented to him by Richard Davenport for a pittance. Then he took it into his head that Hume was mocking him behind his back; he also decided that Hume had been subsidising his stay in England, and of all ...”

“... satire novel, tragicomic melodramatic epistolary lyrical); rhetoric (Homeric Pickwickian, music hall biblical, kinky political). He is credited by the OED with coining the term ‘poetism’, which suggests his misgivings about what poetry had the potential to become as well as his willingness to screw up his own aspirations to poetical effect. But screwing ...”