“... not so made that ‘sweet effluvia darting through the brain’ could cause them to ‘die of a rose in aromatic pain’, but the advance of civilisation was proving him naive. However, the main impulse in this modified smell discourse (as one might now be encouraged to put it) was towards the practice of deodorisation, both of the body and the city. As to ...”

“... imperial, military and diplomatic descent of this country from the Victorian era to the defeat of France in 1940. It was no accident, Barnett argued, that British governments made so many disastrous mistakes, culminating in the ill-starred policy of fair play for Hitler. There was a fundamental cause in the cultural history of the élite: the triumph of ...”

“... alternative régime-in-waiting which they could join. Continental republics know this dualism. In France or Italy, Maclean would probably have been a prominent Communist with a bourgeois life-style, and quite possibly a good desk in the Foreign Ministry whose contents he would not have felt moved to microphotograph each night. In Britain, still an ancien ...”

“... of real merit, but they would probably have been the first to admit that they were among those who rose to sanctity by clinging to the coattails, or more exactly the robes, of Ignatius Loyola and Philip Neri. So much for the growth of cults at the periphery. But there is also the problem of explaining how and why some of these cults were adopted by the centre ...”

“... gone off to live with some slum-lord who had a house in the country and a villa in the south of France. ‘I’ve come back because I want to,’ James said. He put coffee on to perk, turned the gas up high and went out to water the garden. While he sprinkled the wallflowers the coffee spurted all over the cooker. By evening Phyllis’s tidy kitchen ...”

“... off in deep winter; when she finally dismounted, it was spring. ‘The birds were singing. Dust rose behind the seed drills as they worked over the dry fields. Everything was preparing for a new beginning. Could life really go on, as if nothing had happened?’ This book is, in large part, about people who at different times pretended that nothing had ...”

“... both tedious and dangerous. Sir Thomas Wyatt was born in 1503, high and close to the throne, and rose higher and closer. He was the eldest son of Sir Henry Wyatt, who had been a courtier and soldier, a privy counsellor and a bureaucrat of the old school. Henry had remained loyal to Henry Tudor throughout Richard III’s reign, despite starvation and ...”

“... cut it. The wearing of the headscarf, historically never something politicians had worried about, rose to become a national policy concern and was seen as not only un-British, but as a state security concern. In 2015 David Cameron called on institutions to devise their own ‘sensible rules’ about face veils, and Michael Wilshaw, the head of ...”

“... policeman, was suffering from a spreading infection of his face that had started with a rose thorn scratch. He had lost an eye and the infection had spread to his lungs and his shoulder. On 12 February 1941 he was injected with penicillin made by Howard Florey and his team. Alexander’s condition improved dramatically. Treatment continued for five ...”

“... princess manifest, a child withouten stain’ created a sentimental cult that swept through France, it shocked many of those who had known her in England: ‘why that foul-mouthed, virulent, brazen-faced broomstick of a creature should have got herself up as a pad of rose-scented cotton wool is beyond me,’ remarked ...”

“... forth, discussing events of the late 1920s as if they are contemporary – the question of whether France will accept the exiled Trotsky, the demonstration of a shortwave radio in Berlin – until Gospodinov tires of the game and breaks off the correspondence. Several years pass before Gaustine writes again, in a letter dated August 1939, making despairing ...”

“... against Scargill. Libyan money, Russian money, Czech money. Laundered through Ireland, through France, through Switzerland. Something was supposed to stick, and stick it did thanks to the assiduous repetitions of Captain Robert Maxwell and his ‘Labour paper’. But the actual money, as Milne shows, cannot have and did not come from Libya. And the timing ...”

“... Whig, Sloane witnessed at first hand the military persecution of his co-religionists in southern France in the 1680s when studying medicine there, and by the end of that decade, already a Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians, he was established as medical adviser to the new Governor of Britain’s slave colony in Jamaica. The ...”

“... Stuart Britain finds parallels in such Early Modern ‘multiple monarchies’ as Spain, Poland and France but because those states interacted by means of culture and conflict. Though his attempt to reinstate the English Revolution as a branch of the Thirty Years War is sometimes extravagant, Jonathan Scott has a point when he argues that the true context of ...”

“... Normans and the absolutism of the Stuarts, in the Victorian era the Saxon witenagemot mystically rose again in the form of city council chambers. Civic self-government became a symbol of British identity. ‘On the other side of the Channel, Paris is France, but no such rule applies with us,’ the Birmingham Daily Press ...”