“... Thirty years ago, as Keith Middlemas reminds us in his messy, but important and sometimes brilliant new book,* Britain served as the model for the reconstruction of European democracy. Not only the British themselves, but their Continental neighbours, took it for granted that the secret of ordered freedom had been learned more successfully here than anywhere else, and that that secret had been encapsulated in the British version of parliamentary government ...”

“... When Weill died in New York 30 years ago at the age of 50, his reputation in America rested almost entirely on his major contribution to the development of the Broadway musical during the 1940s, and on the popularity of such hit-songs as ‘Speak low’ and ‘September Song’. Little was known of his European work apart from the fact that The Threepenny Opera had been a failure on Broadway in 1933, and was none the less, or all the more, respected as some kind of classic by those who had witnessed its European success, or seen the Pabst film, or even, if they were lucky, attended the Group Theatre’s summer camp in 1936 and heard Weill talk about it ...”

“... The silhouette of Cesar Augusto Sandino, his hands clasped behind his back, his left foot pointing outwards, wearing high-laced army boots and a ten-gallon hat, is the universal emblem of Nicaragua’s revolutionary movement. In the 1920s Sandino led a prolonged guerrilla campaign against the US marines who had been occupying his country since 1912 ...”

“... W.S. Gilbert’s rich comic creation in Iolanthe, a susceptible insomniac who married a fairy; and F.E. Smith, first Earl of Birkenhead, whose appointment to the Woolsack was denounced by the Morning Post as ‘carrying a joke too far’. FE’s life was shamelessly, successfully and simultaneously devoted to ...”

“... Mr Stephen is editing a little dictionary,’ a friend explained to a clergyman foolhardy enough to ask whether Leslie ‘did any writing’. The enterprise in question was the DNB, one of those grandiosely-conceived and indefatigably-executed works of late 19th-century self-regard, comparable to the Victoria County Histories and the Survey of London ...”

“... Anti-Pope Benedict XIII; the Christian protagonist was a Jewish convert named Geronimo de Santa Fe. Unlike the Barcelona Disputation, this debate was characterised by harassment and deliberate falsification of texts. What was at stake was not the destruction of holy books, as it had been in Paris, but the lives of the Jews themselves. Only 22 years ...”

“... You don’t have to be Protestant to have the Protestant Ethic, I tell my students, when we come to Weber in my survey course on Sociological Grand Theory. Look at me, I say: Jewish father, Catholic mother – and I develop an allergic rash at the mere mention of the word ‘holiday’, with all its connotations of reckless expenditure of time and money ...”

“... In 1871, when Queen Victoria was in the tenth year of her widowhood, and when even the great British public was becoming increasingly irritated by her continued seclusion at Windsor, Osborne and Balmoral, a young, clever, radical MP named George Otto Trevelyan published a pamphlet which had the effrontery to ask: ‘What does she do with it?’ Where, Trevelyan wanted to know, was all the money going which the Queen was paid by the Government for the sole purpose of maintaining the duties and dignities of her position as head of state? Instead of being spent as it should have been, on court ceremonial, public appearances and regal display, he believed it was being improperly applied to the creation of a new and essentially private royal fortune ...”

“... Poor in deeds and rich in thoughts’ – that was Friedrich Hölderlin’s lament about his fellow Germans two hundred years ago. In one form or another the idea became familiar. Germany in the 19th century acquired a reputation as the land of poets and thinkers (the phrase was coined by Jean Paul), something that foreign observers viewed with a mixture of condescension and respect ...”

“... Although Thomas Hobbes lived to be 91, and was one of the most famous philosophers of his day, there are only 211 surviving letters to or from him. This compares with 3656 to or from Locke, some twenty thousand to or from Leibniz. For the last three decades of his life Hobbes suffered from Parkinson’s disease, but he always had the assistance of a secretary, and he seems to have replied to letters whenever he received them ...”

“... Fintan O’Toole’s publishers announce that Richard Brinsley Sheridan has been generally ill-served by biographers, ‘who rehash the familiar outlines of his story every decade or so without bringing any intelligent new insights to the task’. By contrast, O’Toole has written a ‘gripping, carefully composed exploration of Sheridan’s career ...”

“... A family on the throne,’ observed Walter Bagehot, in one of those honeyed phrases which may mean more or less than they seem to, ‘is an interesting idea.’ Indeed, it is. But during the past two hundred years of British royal history, it is an idea which has embodied itself in two very different human forms. The first version, which has generally been preponderant, has been the ‘happy family on the throne ...”

“... Southey was never a ‘marvellous boy’, but he lived a boyish life in books for half a century, and Mark Storey’s Life promises to solve a puzzle about his reputation: how someone so earnest and full of ideals could draw the loyalty of one generation, the livid contempt of another, and the nostalgic indulgence of a third, without any noticeable change of character ...”

“... In​ Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, published in 2016, the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels described what happened when sharks started attacking bathers off the New Jersey shore in the summer of 1916. It was a wholly unexpected turn of events: sharks had never been seen that far north before ...”

“... In​ March, as news coverage narrowed to a single story, the housing barristers in my chambers held their monthly meeting. ‘Everything will close,’ one senior colleague predicted, ‘schools, courts …’ But nothing did. For a strange, vertiginous time, life continued as normal. The streets of London were busy, the museums full of people. I went to court, and listened to a judge order that by 16 March, ‘the claimant will decide whether disability is still contested and it shall write to the defendant …’ Would they? Would any solicitors still be in the office? ‘By 30 March, the parties will jointly instruct a consultant to report on the issue of disability status ...”