“... suggested that Maugham script a film about James Brooke, the first White Rajah of Sarawak. ‘He said no; there was no love interest in the first Rajah’s life.’ Sylvia Brooke, the wife of the third and last member of the Brooke dynasty, Rajah Vyner, pitched the idea of a film about the first Rajah to Warner Brothers, who summoned her to Hollywood to talk ...”

“... the fresco, was whitewashed in 1820, but the tale of the luckless swine has been preserved in Edward Payson Evans’s history of the criminal prosecution and capital punishment of animals, first published in 1906 and now reissued. According to Evans, such trials were commonplace, forming part of the fabric of medieval European justice. Pigs accounted for ...”

“... When Tom Hopkinson was nine years old his father called the family together. He had decided, he said, to become a clergyman. Later he told his son that he had been persuaded to take this long-contemplated step by hearing a sermon ‘so distracted and confused that he had realised the clergyman delivering it must be overwhelmed with the burden of his work ...”

“... game puffing itself up like an elephant seal to fight for its colonies? Gore Vidal once said that England should become one of the ‘lands’ and understand its geographical and political place in the world: Iceland, Newfoundland, Greenland, England. If that’s too hard to bear, we could at least look to Scandinavia (does the recent Saturday-night ...”

“... this ethnocentrism needs a political explanation. One might contrast his approach with that of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Said has described 19th-century Orientalism as ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient’, ‘a political vision of reality whose structure ...”

“... night Nathaniel Hawthorne and I sat together at dinner and talked for an hour, although Hawthorne said nothing.’ His admirers included some of the nation’s greatest men: in 1860, thanking a friend for a gift of Halleck’s poems, Abraham Lincoln wrote: ‘Many a month has passed since I have met with anything more admirable than his beautiful ...”

“... 113 years, three months and 11 days.’ Thus the sleeper awakes, and begins – in the words of Edward Bellamy’s title – ‘looking backward’. Julian West had fallen asleep in the Boston of 1887, a city riven with poverty and industrial strife. He was now in a new Boston of peace and harmony, which was ticking away like well-oiled clockwork. It is ...”

“... confirming descent’ stirs an extra beauty from the darkness of the Indian, but it might be said of any doctor. Certainly, no particular doctor is made to exist in our mind’s eye, which is strange, for presumably an actual doctor exists very powerfully in Robin’s memory. The passage is lovely, with its smooth dormition, but it does not belong to ...”

“... in the California Democratic primary in 1968. The immediate chances of a third brother, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, were scuppered after the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 – when a young female aide drowned in a car he drove off a bridge. However, when it was revealed that the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee for 1972, Senator Thomas ...”

“... gang, headed by a rascally rector, who murdered a Leicestershire magnate and robbed one of Edward I’s trailbaston judges, before going on to commit numerous robberies in Lincolnshire. The gang were brothers, well-connected enough to buy pardons from the Crown, or to atone by serving in the King’s Army, but fatally drawn to highway robbery. The ...”

“... up the poor’ into handy subcategories. People who live on council estates aren’t all alike: as Edward, Tom’s unscrupulous editor, puts it, there are the ‘Deserving Poor’, hard-working, decent families with traditional working-class values, and there are ‘Bad Apples’, immigrants, welfare state parasites, ‘sexual degenerates’. The Enrights have ...”

“... life which, even as described in his own anthology, seems relatively unappealing. Whatever may be said in favour of the country house as a mode of government, way of life, shrine of culture or architectural artifact, there is clearly much to be said against it too, in part because so many country-house owners seem to have ...”

“... Eleven of Edward Moulton-Barrett’s dozen children survived to adulthood; and eight were left behind when the eldest escaped to Italy with Robert Browning in 1846 (two sons, including the father’s namesake, had died six years earlier). Moulton-Barrett did not attempt to hoard girl-children only, although the legend surrounding his daughter’s elopement has sometimes suggested that ...”

“... for the half-hour they were delayed by the blockade. GET OFF THE BUS! JOIN US, another banner said, and the official-looking signs from the 9 December blockade were put up at either end of the Facebook bus: WARNING: INCOME GAP AHEAD the one at the front said. STOP DISPLACEMENT NOW, read the one at the back. One ...”

“... Public inquiries​ are an ancient institution. Edward I’s Statute de Officio Coronatoris of 1276, which codified already longstanding law, obliged coroners to ‘go to the place where any be slain or suddenly dead’ to investigate. But coroners’ inquiries rarely deal with matters of general public concern. The idea of holding an inquiry in response to a public scandal is comparatively recent ...”