“... Gerald Percy, a direct descendant of Hotspur (he had a free house too); the former MI5 officer Nicholas Elliott, whose finest hour in the British secret service was to denounce Kim Philby in time for the spy to run to Moscow; and Paul Spicer, Rowland’s devoted bagman, who is well known to every journalist who ever asked a question about Lonrho and had it ...”

“... we can cross-reference the date of the painting with the date on which the sitter gave birth. (In Nicholas Hilliard’s portrait of his 22-year-old wife, Alice, from 1578 – a delicate miniature, watercolour on vellum – only the ear of corn and the pink rosebud pinned to her bodice allude to her pregnancy.) If we didn’t know that Princess Anne was born ...”

“... Mendeleev soon found himself in the stifling worlds of academy and bureaucracy. Gordin is at his best documenting the vagaries of tsarist policy and St Petersburg fashion. It was hard for Mendeleev to find a place where he could make his science pay dividends for conservative politics. His private life became the stuff of a quasi-Tolstoyan romance. An ...”

“... do only what they instinctively believe is necessary to protect themselves from harm, this is the best evidence a jury can have that they are acting in lawful self-defence. What stands for people stands also for nations.’ Nicholas Reed Langen in the Church Times was one of many who pointed out that ‘in domestic law, if ...”

“... believers all pursued healing of the body and the spirit, and sought proximity to the sacred as best they could. It wasn’t so much that the ‘image’s power was fragile, relative and mysterious’, in Koering’s words, but that the workings of the godhead were inscrutable. If seeing is believing, then touching was receiving, and grinding up and ...”

“... The economic side of conversion went further than cupboard love. Christianity was the long-term ‘best buy’. It is true that preachers occasionally had to rely on ad hoc miracles to prove this point, as when Wilfred of York’s preaching in Frisia, in 678, coincided with a bumper harvest. But miracles or no miracles, the fact was that in Northern Europe ...”

“... to rule. The failure of the 1905 Revolution did not gain tsarism much time, and in any case Nicholas II sabotaged his most capable minister, Stolypin; and even his reforms, in Figes’s view, were not ‘capable of stabilising Russia’s social system after the crisis of 1905’. By 1912, urban Russia, he argues (following Leo Haimson’s pioneering ...”

“... two Balkan Wars virtually ended Ottoman power in Europe. It is true that Enver Pasha, perhaps the best-known of the new elite, won huge prestige when he held the city of Edirne for the Empire (Enver Hoxha and Anwar Sadat were two of the thousands of babies to be named after the hero of the hour), but this was small compensation for losing ...”

“... slavery a century and a half after it supposedly ended? These are difficult questions that are not best dealt with in tart formulas about self-inflicted wounds and imperialism being ‘over’. Indian and British, Indochinese and French, American and Native American: the histories are interdependent. Consider Britain’s savage war against ...”

“... held mine in place. I said: it’s a good steak,’ and heard like poetry her reply, ‘It’s the best I’ve ever eaten.’ There was no pursuit and no seduction. We left half the good steak on our plates and a third of the bottle of claret and came out into Maiden Lane with the same intention in both our minds. At exactly the same spot as before, by the ...”

“... holding in a ‘401(k)’ plan, the most popular savings vehicle in the US, is only $20,000. The best secondary pensions are still DB schemes, and these remain quite common in the public sector, where they enjoy an ultimate government guarantee, making them much more secure than the company-sponsored alternatives. Whether in the public or private sector, DB ...”

“... susceptibility. Such fusions of impulse and diagnosis are the hallmark of Lewis’s writing at its best. They also got him into a lot of trouble. Paul O’Keeffe’s new Life of Lewis does not hold back on the toe-jam. Some Sort of Genius is, among other things, a compendium of the many reasons people found to dislike its subject. Lewis became, sometimes by ...”

“... to the nation if it is what eventually leads to its timely collapse. The resignations are the best-publicised outgrowth of governmental decay. The litany of names reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the ...”

“... been brilliantly treated in a collection of essays edited by Jenny Doctor, David Wright and Nicholas Kenyon.* In terms (for instance) of its performing space, the crucial dates were 1893 and 1941 (when the Queen’s Hall was destroyed and the concerts moved to the Albert Hall); in terms of sponsorship and organisation, the key years were 1927 (when the ...”

“... friend. He has never completely kicked the Grub/Fleet Street habit and is probably best known to American audiences for his essays on literary and other topics in upmarket periodicals. In the UK, and to some extent in Australia, however, his name evokes fame of a larger kind, and is strongly linked to television. Between 1972 and 1982, his TV ...”