“... represented a headache for Charles Stewart Parnell. History was Daniel O’Connell, Parnell and John Redmond, who led the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster after Parnell. My grandfather had been interned after the 1916 Rising, and sometimes when the older generation in my family gathered they talked about the Fenians and evictions, Black and Tan ...”

“... what is Mr Playfair doing writing a book about him? For an answer we may perhaps turn to Professor John Taylor, who has known Fred – or rather a mate of his called Uri – from both sides. Eight years ago Uri Geller – ex-fashion model, conjurer and convicted con-man – hit out television screens with a miraculous display of spoon-bending. The effect on ...”

“... captains: William West, killed fighting the Powhatans, and Gabriel Archer, an enemy of Captain John Smith, a self-aggrandising swashbuckler and leader of the Virginia Colony. All four died between 1608 or 1610, years remembered as ‘the starving time’, when desperate colonists first ate snakes and frogs, then boots and belts, and finally one ...”

“... simply part of cosmological society, and the non-Buddhist shrines in the forest clearings of his north Indian territory were part of his aesthetic if not devotional landscape. ‘How delightful the Capala shrine is!’ he said during his terminal illness – an expression of pleasure of a kind which the scribes setting down the otherwise austere ...”

“... politics. But what Hutton calls the ‘new model of ancient Celticity’, introduced in 2010 by John Koch and Barry Cunliffe in Celtic from the West, sees the spread of Celtic languages as a consequence of the existence of an Atlantic trade route rather than ‘waves of invasion’. Trade doesn’t necessarily bring peace. Slave shackles have been found at ...”

“... seems to mark a new area of peculiarly intense interest: in the early colonial period, much of North America was an immediate part of the British world (and some of its most important records are available therefore only in British archives); and Early Modern migration – not ‘immigration’ as such but something broader – which bridges the Atlantic ...”

“... McFarlane to contribute to his biographical series ‘Teach Yourself History’ a short book on John Wyclif, an Oxford intellectual dead for six hundred years and the only arch-heretic bred in Catholic England before the Tudors and the Reformation. In one way this wasn’t surprising, since Rowse and McFarlane were friends. But in another way it was, since ...”

“... What​ have the Romans ever done for us?’ John Cleese asks in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. His audience, not realising his question is rhetorical, replies: aqueducts, sanitation, medicine, public order, etc etc. Guy de la Bédoyère, on the other hand, doesn’t need a list: the Romans’ most important legacy, he suggests in his new book, is literacy, and specifically the habit of written memorialisation ...”

“... Revel in Warwickshire, but the Morte Darthur was written by Thomas Malory of Hutton Conyers in the North Riding, not a thief, not a rapist, but the soldier sent to besiege Alnwick and Bamborough in 1462, and the man excluded from pardon six years later for supporting his near-neighbour, Sir Humphrey Neville, in Lancastrian rebellion. Matthew’s view has been ...”

“... lent by a retired black sailor) and naval costume – and Douglass took a series of trains north. On 4 September 1838 he arrived in New York: ‘I was a FREEMAN, and the voice of peace and joy thrilled my heart!’Crossing the Mason-Dixon Line meant freedom from bondage, symbolised by Douglass’s decision to drop his given surname, Bailey, in favour ...”

“... how Old Testament language about the various ‘covenants’ between God and man contributed to North American exceptionalism. He will have to work hard to understand how Lutherans differed from other Protestants in their understanding of what happens in the Eucharist, and how both Lutherans and those other more advanced Protestants (the ...”

“... The first volume of John Lehmann’s autobiography, published in 1955, starts: When I try to remember where my education in poetry began, the first image that comes to mind is that of my father’s library at the old family home of Fieldhead on the Thames. It is an autumn or winter evening after tea, for James the butler has been in to draw the blinds and close the curtains, and my father is reading under a green-shaded lamp ...”

“... which has been reprinted in two editions since the war, with introductions by André Gide and John Carey. It is arguably Carey’s edition that has been chiefly responsible not only for the high reputation of the Memoirs and Confessions in England but also for the assumption that none of Hogg’s other fictions is worth bothering with. Carey dismissed ...”

“... were very considerable indeed, and the LCS recruited poorly; the Society’s heartland was north and east of Charing Cross, in Southwark and in the metropolitan parishes of Middlesex, where such opportunities were mainly the reserve of the rich and polite, and where the LCS may have helped fulfil the frustrated civic aspirations of literate and ...”

“... again in that war, leading motorised troops from his private Rolls-Royce against the Senussi, North African Muslims who sided with Germany and undertook to invade Egypt. Churchill said later that Bend’Or would have been awarded the Victoria Cross if he hadn’t been a duke. His life in the Twenties and Thirties was scarcely quieter. Grosvenor House was ...”