“... everything in new Waitrose carrier bags, one bag inside another in case one split on the way home. They brought them over and put them on the floor alongside her Sainsbury’s bag. I wasn’t allowed to speak to her, but I sneaked a look at her voucher, and in the section headed ‘nature of crisis’, ‘benefit delays’ had been ticked. I could see ...”

“... the urban poor, and most of those 41 arrested women were sex workers. But even women who stayed at home had to guard against attacks on their respectability. In July 1747, two women brought their neighbour to court for violating their honour. The neighbour, they claimed, had stood at their door the previous night, yelling profanities and calling one of them a ...”

“... The​ home secretary, Priti Patel, claims that the asylum provisions in the Nationality and Borders Bill, which returned to the House of Commons on 22 March after a mauling in the Lords, are ‘humane, compassionate and fair’. It’s hard to recognise these qualities in a bill that is intended to look tough, by dividing refugees up into those who do and those who don’t have visas, or who aren’t eligible for entry under a recognised resettlement scheme ...”

“... lonely, miserable, embittered failure’; Harold and his wife were ‘marginal people’; Lord Curzon’s political career was ‘an ultimate failure’. These quotations from David Cannadine’s collection of essays, Aspects of Aristocracy, show that, for all his gifts, he would not be a front-runner for the editorship of Country Life. Few historians ...”

“... Solicitor-General, Ambassador to the Soviet Union, leader of two ‘missions’ to India, Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons, Minister of Aircraft Production, President of the Board of Trade, Minister of Economic Affairs, Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1942 he was seriously spoken of as successor to Churchill were Churchill’s luck ...”

“... ink drawings, a rebel leader makes himself comfortable in the abbot’s seat like a self-appointed lord of misrule, while the monks flee to Ravensburg with whatever they can carry. Beneath this mayhem lay epicurean delight. ‘It must have been sensational to enter these enclosed communities,’ Roper suggests, ‘to find their warm heating ovens, feather ...”

“... the ‘glorious’ first of June that Nelson damned as an ‘Earl Howe victory’, sent the noble lord himself scuttling back to England for a literally royal reception, while the huge convoy that he had been sent out to intercept made its slow and peaceful way into Brest. The British were driven out of the Low Countries and the émigré force they put ashore ...”

“... which no man can forecast.’ Thus Gladstone, unsuccessfully commending to the Commons the first Home Rule Bill, for Ireland, in 1886, a Bill which set the terms of discussion about major constitutional change in the United Kingdom and established categories which remain remarkably unchanged today, as we face up to Scottish and Welsh devolution. Gladstone ...”

“... allowed her to become fluent in French, German and Italian. In 1908 she joined the Society of Home Students in Oxford, where her father was a chaplain, and read for the Honours History School, specialising in the Renaissance. While women were not yet allowed to matriculate, she did well in finals, albeit not as well as her tutors felt she might have done ...”

“... promoted by a British education and the experiences of African students both in Britain and at home.By the end of the 19th century, African students were arriving in modest numbers and had begun to organise around shared concerns. This generation is less well known than its 20th-century successors, but it included A.B.C. Merriman-Labor of Sierra Leone, who ...”

“... most vividly in the extraordinary ten-year advance of the Scottish National Party under its Home Rule banner, but striking a strong chord, too, in Labour, Conservative and Liberal support for political devolution – seemed to exhibit all the ‘protean strength’ which has fascinated Rosalind Mitchison in the collection she has edited of essays on ...”

“... volumes reached their climaxes with the deaths of Boswell’s father and of Johnson respectively. Lord Kames, another great man whose biography Boswell was planning to write, died near the beginning of the last volume, so that it has the additional imposed symmetry of beginning and ending with the death of a potential biographee: that volume closes with the ...”

“... an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: The Cult of Lord Byron, confirmed the allure of the poet’s ‘life and legend’. Everyone seems to agree that the making of a celebrity (somewhere he must have been called a ‘cultural icon’) is fascinating enough in itself. Never has a dead poet lived on so ...”

“... fireOr the starbeams dart through them –Gertrude Stein once memorably remarked of her childhood home of Oakland, California, ‘There is no there there,’ a phrase which seems to me coincidentally to capture what Shelley does in some of his very best poems, and suggests the ways in which he is unlike most of his Romantic contemporaries, who were in one way ...”

“... voters to react in a particular way to political issues. In 1841, Jews were encouraged to vote for Lord John Russell (a Whig) because he was in favour of Jewish Emancipation – he won by nine votes. The Jewish vote, clearly, could be mobilised and put to good use. The Liberals put up five Jewish candidates at the next election, including David Salomons (who ...”