“... far and wide, until every family catches infection from it.The idea of England as endangered took root. Preserving proper boundaries, keeping England white, was seen by many as a priority. Two years later Long published his three-volume History of Jamaica, in which he argued that black people were essentially different from and inferior to white ...”

“... looking at Michael’s hands on the wheel and thinking how much nicer they are than my hands.*‘John Lennon,’ Michael said. ‘That’s the first thing Mum remembers, him being shot.’I said, ‘Is it?’‘Well, that’s what you told me.’Maureen is doing her homework. ‘It’s Miss Macaulay,’ said Michael. ‘Milestones. We did it two years ...”

“... own ground in ‘the valleys of the Mississippi’. Even everyday language was volatile: old words took on new meanings, and new words were constantly being invented. There was ‘no common arbiter, no permanent tribunal’, and therefore no shared understanding. In contrast to feudal society, where everyone, lord or serf, remained rooted to the land, and ...”

“... read an article in the Daily Mirror about Lila Field and her new London Theatre for Children. She took Noël to audition and Field, German in origin but now with a ‘devastatingly refined’ English accent and ‘foaming with lace’, accepted him. It was one foot on a shaky ladder. His fellow juvenile, Alfred Willmore (later famous in Irish theatre as ...”

“... the remains of Josef Mengele and giving congressional testimony about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, among other high-profile cases. He died nine years ago, but the colourful interviews and writings he left behind enable Hagerty to provide a substantial account. In 1984, Snow, a chain-smoker in cowboy boots, was invited to Argentina by the ...”

“... as it was problematic in theology and law. Renaissance and early modern religious authorities took a dim view of claims to know what properly belonged only to God. Drawing on Old Testament authority, the Catholic Church banned ‘all forms of divination’, explicitly mentioning ‘palm-reading’, and in some strands of Protestantism your fate was sealed ...”

“... books. She also wrote poems (much less good than the novels) and studies of Mary Shelley and John Masefield, whose narrative verse she admired. She then had a protracted bust-up with Stanford, which had its origins in what was to prove the foundational crisis in her life. In late 1953 she was taking too much Dexedrine, which she used as an appetite ...”

“... for such kind of partiality is natural to mankind.’ The Franklins kept slaves, and Benjamin took two with him to England. When one of them ran away, Franklin hauled him back to Craven Street, just as Jefferson did when his slaves ran away from Monticello. But after their slave-boy Othello died in Philadelphia in 1760, neither Franklin nor his ...”

“... always required a transcendent faith to Comte’s Religion of Humanity, Durkheim’s approach took its place in what might be called a multi-authored pendant – or riposte – to Weber, a kind of ‘Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Solidarism’. Whatever the merit or otherwise of these meditations on the need for a civil religion, not a few from ...”

“... Party at large, which paid the price of existence for it, knew nothing of the affair. The plot took Sukarno by surprise: but it was his rescuer Suharto and not his kidnappers who broke him, by tarring him with the same brush. In the USSR, the Communist Party had become so ineffectual an institution that the organisers of the coup – it was one of its most ...”

“... in Whitman, just as Whitman’s many early admirers in England had done, like Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds, who seemed primarily taken with his poetry because it spoke for and to gay men like themselves. He is at his frequent best, however, when his poetry is least negotiable in the hands of people who read it on the look-out for what they hope ...”

“... the first time, they learned to live as a family. Antoinette found the girl unrewarding – she took after her father, and perhaps Antoinette could not dismiss from her mind the knowledge that at the age of four Marie-Thérèse had told her household: ‘I wish the Queen were dead.’ Louis-Charles had always been her favourite. Like the child who had been ...”

“... religion’, in which America is a ‘shining city’ where the sacred fire of freedom is kept. John Keegan recently announced, in the course of a television debate in which I also took part, that to allow ‘cultural history’ onto the protected turf of war studies is to issue a chaotic licence to mavericks who will ...”

“... is not one of substance, but one of timing. The formulation by Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay of an intellectual defence of the new American system of representative government came at the end of the revolutionary process, and in the aftermath of the drawing up of a new Constitution. Sieyès set out the core of his ideas at the very beginning of ...”

“... become a winner, to lift yourself out of the group and leave all those losers behind. But unlike John Ford or Jean Renoir – whose Toni also tells a story of tragic love among migrant workers – Malick conveys scant sense of the group, the living relationships, concordant or discordant, that bind people together. Like the outlaw couple in Badlands, the ...”