“... their monarch. They let him down badly by rejecting a live lamb lowered on a rope. ‘The lamb rose up and went towards the lions, who very gently looked upon him and smelled him without any further hurt. Then the lamb was softly drawn up again.’ That happened in 1604, the year when visitors to the Tower ‘would doubtless have heard’, above the ...”

“... certainly a factor and so surely was jealousy. Annan’s military career had been brilliant; he rose rapidly through the Joint Intelligence Staff, becoming a colonel and an OBE at 29. Runciman’s war was odder and less distinguished. Guy Burgess, his first pupil at Cambridge, recommended him in 1940, on the strength of his linguistic skills, for the post ...”

“... Jones was never exactly poor: his father was a real self-made man, a brilliant mathematician who rose from charity school in Llanfechell to become vice-president of the Royal Society (introducing ‘pi’ in its modern meaning along the way). But he died before his son’s third birthday, and Jones started life with only a modest bequest. Tutoring Althorp ...”

“... and his own new palace by the Thames; his likeness to God on earth; the fusing of the white rose and the red in his marriage to Elizabeth of York; its progeny; and its progeny’s progeny which must soon follow, securing the dynasty in perpetuity. But as London thrilled to the rich displays of chivalry, roses, pomegranates, castles, senators and ...”

“... in plenty, and it belonged to anyone who could shoot it. In any case, in England armed crime first rose and then began to fall while the Game Laws were still in force, so we must look elsewhere for an explanation. Perhaps the courts played a greater role than at first sight appears. Malcolm argues that when licensing was finally introduced in 1920 the main ...”

“... enemy Sir Robert Harley initially supported it, Sarah did not let this put her off. But as shares rose dramatically, she began to believe that the bubble would burst and dumped her own shares, persuading Marlborough to do the same. They more than tripled their money. With the profits, Sarah then hedged her bet. She lent money to those clamouring to ...”

“... or ‘What am I?’ to: ‘Mr Boswell! Why, how fine you are!’ Nor was it just that his career rose only to fall and – falling – often promptly rebounded. Born in 1740, the heir of a cool, clever Lowland laird and lawyer, he became very rapidly a young literary lion, an acquaintance of Rousseau and Voltaire, the close friend, not just of Samuel ...”

“... were practising had not moved on since Francis Bacon, whose system was criticised so memorably by Macaulay: We are not inclined to ascribe much practical value to that analysis of the inductive method which Bacon has given in the second book of the Novum Organum . . . A plain man finds his stomach out of order. He never heard Lord Bacon’s name. But he ...”

“... the number of executions, there were several periods towards the end of the century when the rate rose to very high levels. For instance, we are told that ‘the overflowing of the jails may have been partly responsible for the astonishing level that capital punishment was to reach in the mid-1780s.’ In the second half of the century, fines increased in ...”

“... crude and brutal assertion of superiority by ‘civilisation’ over ‘barbarism’ – or what Macaulay liked to call the strength of civilisation without its mercy. By racialism Ballhatchet means, in fact, something different. At the end of the century much of the so-called Western ‘civilisation’ or the modern way of life had come to be shared by many ...”

“... Question in the 1960s. One protagonist, the polymathic E.A. Freeman, echoed some famous words of Macaulay, celebrating the ‘cause for which Harold died on the field and Waltheof on the scaffold’ (Waltheof was the last survivor of the Old English aristocracy: he was executed for treason in 1076 after a rebellion which, according to the sources, was ...”

“... with Business Management from York. Rowed throughout my degree – proud to be that white rose. Showed those public school $%^&’s how to do it properly. Making bombs and other stuff for a living – would tell you more but I’d have to kill you. [A reference to his work for QinetiQ.] Getting married to the most amazing woman in the world this ...”

“... cotton from the Southern states. It blots the reputation of such liberals as Henry Brougham and Macaulay that they argued for a free trade that effectively maintained slavery, even though it was bound to be harder to abolish slavery globally than to repurpose Liverpool’s slave ships when market forces made the processing of slave-grown materials ...”