“... the message of restoration underpinning Masonic ritual – the rebirth in every Master Mason of King Solomon’s murdered builder Hiram Abiff – proved congenial to English Jacobites, while Philip Jenkins detects a distinctive Jacobite and Country hue in Welsh Masonry. On the other hand, John Money, a keen student of provincial clubbability, notes that ...”

“... book can readily be compared to works like Judy Garland: The Secret Life of an American Legend (David Shipman), Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend (Steven Bach), or biographies of the Kennedys. It is characteristic of many such books that they begin far back, with early antecedents, and in the case of Seabiscuit there are many to account for, from Charles ...”

“... the Queen of Romania, Queen Victoria’s third son, the Duke of Connaught, and less frequently King Edward VII. Rose quotes one of Nancy’s ‘most celebrated bons mots’: when invited by the King to play bridge, she is said to have refrained with the claim: ‘Why I don’t even know the difference between a ...”

“... as the trial approached, his attitude changed perceptibly. Writing to his friend the journalist David Ayerst, Tippett declared himself ‘very much at peace and ready to go’.On 21 August 1943, at 7.30 a.m. precisely, after serving two months of his three-month sentence, Tippett was released from Wormwood Scrubs. He was met by Britten and Pears, who would ...”

“... In David Grossman’s 1998 novel, Be My Knife, an antiquarian book-dealer starts a passionate correspondence with a woman whom he has barely caught sight of across a room. The unlikely circumstances of their relationship, its unusual fusion of intimacy and distance, allow them to say, or rather write, things which neither of them has ever admitted before ...”

“... of Pevsner’s interests, revealed in his wartime editorship of the distinguished series of King Penguins, and particularly in his own contribution, The Leaves of Southwell, a little book devoted to the celebration of the naturalistic foliage carvings in the chapter-house of that most hidden of English cathedrals. The Shell Guides, conceived in the ...”

“... now comprise around 160 Alliance, 180 Labour and 280 Conservative MPs – and the new books by David Butler and Vernon Bogdanor would have vanished beneath a stampede of eager buyers. As things are, though the distorted election results have robbed them of some of their topicality, they will be very widely and minutely studied by politicians, students of ...”

“... across the title page. Wolfreston owned twelve Shakespeare quartos, including editions of Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet, as well as Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and The Jew of Malta, Donne’s Poems and Mary Wroth’s Urania among many other works.She was also an enthusiastic tagger, recording not only her name but sometimes the hands through which a ...”

“... or derision. He entirely eluded the notice of the Earl of Clarendon in the 17th century and of David Hume in the 18th. Even the Jacobin William Godwin, the first champion of the Civil War radicals, judged his exploits ‘scarcely worthy to be recorded’, and S.R. Gardiner’s comprehensive history of the Commonwealth contained only two references to ...”

“... ideas, patterns of consumerism, trade networks, secular culture, war efforts, as well as a king, with the people across the Atlantic. Consequently, Colonial American historians have long taken it for granted (as British historians rarely have) that their studies should have an Atlanticist scope, embracing aspects of Britain’s past as well as their ...”

“... with glowering skies. ‘You seem to have had very bad luck with your weather, Mr Piper,’ the king is said to have commented when he saw them. It isn’t immediately obvious how in the space of five years an artist could have come to be both a pioneer of international modernism in Britain and a dainty recorder of English country houses. In the mid-1930s ...”

“... first half of their first volume of A Social History of British Broadcasting Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff seem scarcely to try. As they tread the well-worn path through the BBC’s approaches – first as a company, then as a corporation – to politics and international affairs and the General Strike and the Abdication crisis and all the other familiar ...”

“... growing up. Virginie Despentes was born in 1969 and grew up in Nancy, in north-east France. In King Kong Theory, a short half-memoir half-essay published in France in 2006, she writes that when she was 15 she was briefly sectioned in a psychiatric institution, and at 17 left Nancy for Lyon, never to return. As a teenager, her passion in life was following ...”

“... bread, till thou return unto the ground.’ The New English Bible translates as ‘labour’ what King James’s scholars called ‘sorrow’ – ‘Accursed shall be the ground on your account. With labour you shall win your food from it.’ A few pages later comes the very odd passage in which Noah’s son Ham sees him naked when drunk. Awakening from his ...”

“... Sonnets. The court advised Bampfylde ‘in the mean time to be upon his good behaviour’ to the King, ‘and all his Subjects, especially towards the said Sr Joshua Reynolds’. One is left wondering how successfully Bampfylde maintained ‘good behaviour’ in the weeks that followed. There is no reference in the Public Advertiser’s report to the ...”