“... Margaret Mead and her second husband, Reo Fortune, spent nearly two years in the interior of New Guinea between 1931 and 1933. Just 29 years old when they set out, Mead had already published two bestselling books, Coming of Age in Samoa and Growing up in New Guinea. Fortune, a highly competitive, paranoid and occasionally violent New Zealander, had yet to make his name as an anthropologist ...”

“... land, with pain and broken bodies. The thing to do was to hold your ground. The women’s emotion rose up like smoke, and joined the air of political fact, as if somewhere they could hear the guns, and picture their husbands crying for shame. The Rent Strikes began. Life would not be the same again. Not for those women, nor the babies they held. And not for ...”

“... small men have to be assertive and ambitious if they are to be taken seriously, and Barrie rose to the challenge with fanatical energy. Idleness was not part of the attraction of youth for him. He never stopped working, and he saw through that side of his nature too: ‘There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the ...”

“... years to a House of Lords ruling under the Criminal Justice Act. Overturning the convictions of Margaret Jones and Richard Lloyd, the Stonehenge Two, for ‘trespassory assembly’ at the site, Lord Irvine described the right of access as ‘an issue of fundamental constitutional importance’. The exclusion zone became illegal and on its website English ...”

“... divided, disgruntled Democrats packed the Chicago Coliseum in July 1896 as William Jennings Bryan rose to the platform and delivered a roaring speech – still the speech for part of the American left – about an economic chimera. Bryan demanded that the United States peg its currency not to gold but to silver – the equivalent of treating cancer with grape ...”

“... self-made father with connections in Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington and London, and by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a devout but fashionable Catholic mum, as at home on the golf links or the ski slopes as in Windsor Castle. After making millions in banking, real estate and film distribution, the father wants to devote his life to public service, and to ...”

“... Nelly’s not very wonderful career on the stage came to an end at this period, but her fortunes rose. By the age of 21 she owned a fine four-storey house near Mornington Crescent. Tomalin thinks it must have been bought by Dickens. ‘In eighteen months, the situation of the Ternan family had been transformed from uncertainty to something approaching ...”

“... however, the obvious refuge is not Pienza but Venice. Two recent studies, by Rona Goffen and Margaret King, reveal some of the distinctive forms of cultural patronage in that city. Goffen’s Piety and Patronage concentrates on three works painted for the Franciscan church of the Frari: Giovanni Bellini’s triptych, Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin ...”

“... commercial crises for which the king was entirely ill-equipped. York successfully outmanoeuvred Margaret of Anjou, Henry’s wife and principal cheerleader, who attempted to secure the regency for herself, but his success came at a price: the nobility split into factions, provoking civil war. Power slipped into the hands of the nobles, whose alliances ...”

“... myself in my own mind.’ Or ‘I was the great man ... in a suit of imperial blue, lined with rose-coloured silk, and ornamented with rich gold-wrought buttons. What a motley scene is life.’ This sort of thing is attractive in our own age, much impressed by male peacocks ‘in touch with their own feelings’. But one disparagement does stick even ...”

“... of the Blood Royall’ of the two kingdoms, shows James at the head and his great grandmother Margaret Tudor at the centre of an illuminated pedigree in which the graceful twining of Tudor roses disguises the somewhat oblique nature of his descent. Inigo Jones’s costume design for Oberon (1610). From this point the exhibition seems to burst into ...”

“... Some time​ in 1979, after the death of Sid Vicious and before the enthronement of Margaret Thatcher, Vivienne Westwood ‘lost interest’ in punk. She and her lover Malcolm McLaren had been at the heart of the British version: they had dreamed up much of the look, the attitude and the lyrics, though not the sound ...”

“... surveys the long march of self-renewals with the benevolent discrimination of a spectator at the Rose Bowl parade. Each float – Puritanism, American Naissance, Modernism, Post-Modernism – seems, as it purrs by, at once more ornate than its predecessor and more elementally vigorous in its overturning of tradition. Always there is the promise of something ...”

“... by the suddenly-famous Angus Wilson, Dwight Macdonald ‘introduced himself, American-style, to Rose Macaulay, describing himself as an editor of the Partisan Review and founder of his own journal Politics: she stared at him and said, “Have you come all the way across the room to tell me that? How kind.” ’ ‘American-style’ may be a hint that in ...”

“... an earth full of trees and flowers below, the centrepiece of which would be ‘a royal, rich, red rose … unto which rose shall appear another rich, white rose, unto whom all the flowers shall bow and evidently give sovereignty, showing the rose to be ...”