“... Even at the end of his new book, it’s not clear where Edward Luttwak is coming from, as they say in his country. He leaves no doubt, however, about where he dreads coming to. Instead of being smoothed through ‘the spotless elegance of Narita or Frankfurt or Amsterdam or Singapore’, the hapless international traveller who comes into New York’s Kennedy Airport will walk into one of the tatty terminals that near-bankrupt airlines no longer maintain, mildly surprised at the naked plywood and unfinished gypsum board ...”

“... in June 1520, contemporaries fell into a kind of stupor. It was the eighth wonder of the world, said one. Another thought the temporary palaces – erected at staggering expense for the sole purpose of a fortnight’s worth of jousts and junketing – outdid the ‘miracles of the Egyptian pyramids and the Roman amphitheatres’. To one Italian ...”

“... when he told them that water was coming in, they laughed. ‘Get back into bed,’ one of them said. ‘You’re not in Ireland now.’ August Wennerstrom, a Swedish pastor travelling with some of his flock, went straight to the third-class smoking-room. ‘We tried to get something to drink,’ he reported afterwards, ‘but the bar was closed. Nothing ...”

“... won the war and Carthage lost it. On this subject the little dialogue in Brecht’s Galileo has said the last word: ‘Unhappy the country without heroes!’ – ‘No. Unhappy the country that needs them.’ How much difference did leadership make to the history of Britain from the Mid-Victorian era, when no great talents were needed to govern kingdom and ...”

“... Rome (so, probably, encouraging the twinning of statue and building). The Emperor Commodus, it is said, looked back more warmly to Nero and found propaganda value in giving the Colossus another makeover, inserting his own features in the face and dressing it up as his favourite deity, Hercules. But, with the fall of Commodus, it was soon back as a sun ...”

“... a no-nonsense, suck-it-and-see anti-intellectualism. For socialist playwrights like John Arden and Edward Bond, the consequence, in one case, is external and in the other a form of internal exile. But the most noted instance of the prophet rejecting his own country is the director Peter Brook who, having forged a glittering career in the British theatre, from ...”

“... in some sense be a man. ‘We all know women with a strong dash of the masculine temperament,’ Edward Carpenter writes in this stereotypical vein, ‘and we all know men whose almost feminine sensibility and intuition seem to belie their bodily form.’ The fallacy of ‘intrinsic’ gender – of gender being not a social construction but a biological ...”

“... acquittal by a jury in June 1688 coincided with the birth of a male heir to the throne, James Edward Stuart. To the Protestant establishment this was the last straw. While gossip ran around that the child was not the royal couple’s and had been smuggled into the palace in a warming pan, ambitious politicians were converting to Catholicism. The Vicar of ...”

“... just had them fired on by soldiers after a reading of the Riot Act. The governor of the island, Edward Eyre, on the advice of his military commander and his law officers, decreed martial law in the county where Morant Bay lay, but excluded the town of Kingston. Although the uprising was put down within a week, in the month that passed before the decree ...”

“... office. ‘Just her presence meant that there was no hanky-panky, nobody cut corners,’ Johnson said. ‘It wasn’t that she knew anything about buildings, but it was like having the crown prince present.’ But Lambert wasn’t the sort of person happy just to supervise. When a model needed to be built, she offered to help: the offer was rejected but she ...”

“... is a snip at £18.The abbey’s association with royalty and power is woven into its fabric. Edward the Confessor built the first abbey, next to his palace at Westminster, in 1042, and William the Conqueror became the first king to be crowned in it, on Christmas Day 1066. Henry II, fancying a saint in the family, bought ...”

“... Jean​ Cooke liked painting her sofa. ‘I kept painting that sofa,’ she said. ‘It dominated my life. People came and sat down on it and I painted them.’ In Sofas Galore (c.1980), two figures recline at opposite ends of a pale peach Chesterfield, its creases and buttons lovingly re-created in paint. The two figures are the same person: Jason, Cooke’s son ...”

“... unwelcome to Henry, and led, as he saw it, to a break in church history. During the reign of Edward I, ‘the bishops of Saint Andrews and Glasgow were not as they now be archbishops, but recognised the province of our archbishop of York, which extended over all that country.’ Is it any wonder that the Venetian historian Sabellicus ‘calleth Scotland ...”

“... in 1935 and then remade in 1951. Wilder, in 1959, was thinking mainly of the original, which he said was ‘deliriously bad’. Coming from him this was a compliment rather than a complaint, and he certainly found in the old work the basic premise of the new one: two male musicians join an all-woman band. In the earlier film this was one of their many ...”

“... worked out all right in the end – as propagandists for England’s providential destiny always said it would. Episodes of apparent divine preservation – the wrecking of the Spanish Armada in 1588 and the failure of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 – were exploited for all they were worth. This rhetoric masked the pragmatic manoeuvres taking place behind the ...”