“... No​ one could understand. My dad used to come in, glare at the TV and stalk off. My mum was bemused. My brother detested it. Once it was no longer cool, the other kids mocked me, and eventually I stopped mentioning it. I didn’t mind the secrecy – my passion acquired a pure intensity this way, stoppered up like a gin ...”

“... the United States of America is suddenly a possibility. The aged President Kennedy (Joseph P., not John F.) plans to fly to Berlin for a summit meeting. Since all this is conjecture as to how things might have turned out, it can only be assessed against your own, or other people’s, conjectures. The two best-known novels based on the premise of a German or ...”

“... At the heart of the place was a ‘Rolls-Royce of radiograms’, on which ‘you could stack no fewer than ten LPs’; Garfitt danced there ‘in my own space until the detail of the music moved me out into the room, my hands picking up one line, my feet another … arcing across it and half-spinning back, trying to paint the music into it.’ They ...”

“... up to the counter, slap down some cash and say, ‘this is my kind of book,’ very loudly. Well, no, this is written for a post-everything kind of reader, one who requires a carefully chosen meta-narrative that can be smoked out of its hiding place, publicly disembowelled and then made extinct (it helps to be up on the latest PoMo-speak). In this case, the ...”

“... male power, the Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey. Like the third storey at Thornfield Hall from whose terrace Jane surveys the landscape, vowing to have her share of life, even if she is a female and ‘poor, obscure and plain’ to boot, Galesia’s ‘garret-closet’ occupies a symbolic space between the life she lives and the life she ...”

“... his books, which descend on the study of the decades around 1600 like a great waterfall. There are no signs of fatigue, no inanimate sentences. Behind the loosely conversational manner of his prose lies a precision of thought and structure. How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage, an amiably but inherently contentious ...”

“... celebrity Axel Munthe. His extraordinary memoir, The Story of San Michele, was published by John Murray in 1929, when Munthe was 72. The first edition rapidly sold out; it went into its 20th impression in January 1931, and has been in print ever since.* The reasons for its wide and enduring appeal have to do partly with its subject-matter – Munthe led ...”

“... plotline. But how to screw the girl without ending up in the new semi with the pram in the hall on the council estate at the edge of town? Women in these fictions are enticing but dangerous, knees-together honeypots bartering sex for a ring. To quote Julie Christie, who would know: ‘They exist to be disliked by the heroes.’How, then, to make sense ...”

“... Whig historiography stood four-square to its age; there was no suggestion that it was addressed to the happy few, or that it appealed to the justice of posterity against the spirit of the times. Posterity has on the whole avenged itself for this neglect. Macaulay will presumably not lack readers for a good while to come, and Stubbs will enjoy affectionate and respectful remembrance in the small circle of medievalists ...”

“... it is the heterodox, intersecting and often bottom-up nature of urban change that stands out. No process operated in isolation, and as planning bumped up against profit-seeking and deindustrialisation prompted a turn to ‘heritage’, new interests were mobilised and new narratives appeared.Take ‘planning’. The word carries elitist and top-down ...”

“... end – five exhalations, bray of expiry,      absolute silence ... Under the Festival Hall is a foetid    tenebrous concert strobed by blue ambulance light.  PVC/newspapers/rags Since Reading on the first and last pages of this book imitates these ‘five exhalations’, it’s curious that there are actually six in Sibelius’s ...”

“... At some time in the 1730s Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, Midlothian, wrote down advice on the building of what he called ‘a family house’. This should consist of a central main block and two side pavilions, as a precaution against destruction by fire. ‘The main or chief Body of the House ought to be at Least double the Bigness of each pavilion and may serve chiefly for lodging the Master of the family and the better kind of Guests who come to visit him ...”

“... piece on radical pirates after the Restoration; Wilson Hays offers an interesting study of John Everard; and there is some predictably tough and valuable political analysis from David Underdown and Nicholas Rogers. What emerges from most of these essays, however, is not so much the undoubted ideological confluence of English and American radicals, as ...”

“... almost without a break, from 1793 to 1815; they end just 12 years before the Great Reform Act. At no other time has Parliament experienced such a concentrated amalgam of trial, triumph and sheer, exhilarating talent. No fewer than 13 prime ministers ...”

“... or domicile, and is thus a most slippery concept on which to rear up an edifice of social theory. No one doubts that the Great War wrought changes in attitudes as between ‘Us and Them’, but many of these changes were already on the way. Dr Waites does not shy from the question: if the Archduke’s driver had not made the wrong turning in Sarajevo, would ...”