“... that still ruled Europe in the years before 1914, Wilhelm’s inordinate loquacity stood out. Tsar Nicholas II was retiring by nature and George V was painfully shy. Scarcely a peep was heard in public from the elderly Austrian emperor Franz Joseph, a notoriously austere and laconic figure. And the contrast is heightened in retrospect by the fact that ...”

“... to hold such esoteric ideas, although most other leading Nazis treated them with disdain.* In 1985 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke drew attention in The Occult Roots of Nazism to the ideas of Ariosophy, pioneered before the First World War by the Austrian racist Lanz von Liebenfels, as well as to the doctrines of Guido von List, another Austrian esotericist. These ...”

“... of Anatomy, The Proscenium of Truth, The Catholic Medicine. Among his contemporaries Fludd was best known as a physician, though his election to the Royal College of Physicians in 1609 came after four years of controversy, mainly concerning his enthusiasm for the controversial ‘chymicall physick’ of Paracelsus. In his heyday he was a renowned ...”

“... Tales: they are printed the way they are because someone, after Chaucer’s death, had to make the best he could of what he had. Yet though everyone knows this, in a sort of a way, their profession makes critics dig order and unity out of somewhere: ‘Most studies of the Tales,’ Pearsall writes in an uncompromising footnote, ‘use one or other of the ...”

“... alternative to Sikorsky, they agreed, should be put together, and the Government should do its best to encourage it. Heseltine was out of the country in early November, but when he returned he set his mind to the task. On 26 November, he met Sir John Cuckney, who from the outset was anxious to proceed with the Sikorsky take-over, and told him he was ...”

“... disliked: they are pigs, flics. Just how bewildered this animosity is making them is revealed in Nicholas Alex’s vivid book, New York Cops Talk Back: A Study of a Beleaguered Minority.1 They used to derive their self-esteem from the belief that they were the guardians of society, the embodiment of its values: they represented right. The police ...”

“... died in 1641. Given the ‘eclectic’ character of Bedford’s religious preferences, which are best characterised as Calvinist Episcopalian, and the amphibious nature of his associations with both Royalists and Parliamentarians, Russell concluded that his ancestor’s career provided ‘absolutely no clue to what side he would have taken if he had lived to ...”

“... if Wyatt literally saw Anne’s beheading from his cell. It would have been an oblique view at best, fitting for a poet whose verse unswervingly resists directness. Opacity was a necessity for a court poet serving a king who killed over words; ‘familiar secret talk, nothing affirming’ had been enough to condemn Thomas More. As a result Wyatt’s verse ...”

“... remains limited, and is more pronounced in the United States than in Europe. Two historians, Nicholas Guyatt of the University of York and Luke Clossey of Simon Fraser University, have compiled a fascinating report on this, an extract from which recently appeared in the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History. After examining the ...”

“... the conversations he is describing more is going on than is quite being said. The moment that best illustrates this (and it would be my poetical desert island disc for its great social delicacy) is when Dante and Virgil meet the poet Statius in purgatory. Statius explains who he is and tells Dante that Virgil’s Aeneid was mother and nurse to him. Virgil ...”

“... George Carman QC, the best known British advocate of his time, died of cancer on 2 January last year. Shortly afterwards, the Daily Telegraph published an obituary which listed the famous criminal and libel cases he had won, and examined his ferocious court-room reputation before concluding: ‘Away from work, Carman was a reasonably enthusiastic guest on the party circuit, but essentially lived a quiet life ...”

“... and designer Hans Schmoller. Yet from the beginning Pevsner had a nose for the English specialists best able to help him. Cultivated clergymen, cataloguers of dovecots, the devoted biographers of local architects and minor stained-glass artists populate the acknowledgments, from R.W. Wailes, expert on the windmills of Nottinghamshire in 1951, to Rosemary ...”

“... had displaced horses. It was unhelpful at the time that quantitative economic historians such as Nicholas Crafts were debunking simplistic stories of the industrial revolution. But such subtleties were ignored in favour of the fables spun by future Nobel Prize winners such as the economist William Nordhaus, who insisted that economic growth should not be ...”

“... and David Butler sum up the entire era. The argument starts with the first and by some way the best piece in the collection, Paul Addison’s essay on ‘The Road from 1945’. Addison takes issue with Corelli Barnett’s Audit of War, and its diagnosis of the causes of Britain’s post-war economic decline. Barnett argued, not only that British economic ...”

“... Cromwell’s time, reduced Elizabeth Bowen to the vagrant life which in a sense came to suit her best, the life of a prince or princess in exile: and in literary terms one in which ‘the Great God Chance’, as she named him, could be let loose to overwhelm her imagination. As with James, iron discipline was none the less the order of the day; the dismal ...”