“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... left to the imagination about what could happen if a mistake on the order of 1914 were made again. John Kennedy read The Guns of August as a parable of the Cuban Missile Crisis. ‘I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time [called] “The Missiles of October”,’ his brother Robert quotes him as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... condemnation by the League for its actions in Ethiopia. On resigning his post in 1937, Pilotti took part in the celebrations in Genoa of the conquest of Ethiopia; and during the Second World War headed the high court of occupied Ljubljana after Italy’s annexation of Slovenia, where resistance was met with mass deportations, concentration camps, and ...”

“... reporting and persuading were, for him, seamlessly joined creative acts. He liked writing and took enormous pains in composition; he cared deeply about its power and effects on readers. Whatever might be meant by the ‘essence’ of evolution by natural selection is something you could say was discovered: the text called the Origin was composed, in ...”

“... that Controversy was make or break. In the end, swayed by his hypo-sharp management team, Prince took the gig. It didn’t go well. On the first night, 9 October, Prince and his band, the Revolution, barely made it through four songs before getting booed offstage. (Accounts differ, some of them wildly, but it seems to have been one track in ...”