“... the comfortable classes to ignore such appalling conditions. Out of fashion today, Priestley may not seem to belong in this company, and I have to admit that I came to English Journey expecting sentimental uplift mixed with anecdotal illustration of the claim that there’s nowt so queer as folk. There is a certain amount of that, but it’s far from ...”

“... decades that took a retrospective grip on the popular imagination were the 1890s and the 1920s. It may not be a coincidence that both have been characterised as fun-loving eras that chucked out staid manners and stale customs, whose social revolutionaries were libertines (Mae West) and gangsters (James Cagney). Perhaps more than any other agency, it was ...”

“... of habeas corpus has in recent years lost much of its practical importance. Experienced judges may retire without ever having granted the remedy, or being asked to do so. This is not because today’s judges are less protective of personal liberty than their forebears – perhaps the reverse is true. It is because the function of habeas corpus has, to a ...”

“... is it for? Who and what should be included in it? And where does it take place? For all that it may appear to offer a uniquely intelligible account of a clearly demarcated political and geographical space, national history is intrinsically problematic. Territorial and maritime boundaries are usually porous. The frontiers of virtually all self-proclaimed ...”

“... did he or didn’t he?’ Of course, not everything has to be footnoted, and truth may come from invention as well. One of the most vivid Anglo-versions of French social history was Robert Baldick’s Dinner at Magny’s (1971), in which everything that was spoken by the famous literary diners was a true quote, while the context and narrative ...”

“... the president and his party fresh confidence in their efforts at comprehensive reform. Whatever may happen now, it was plain the defeat of healthcare would have been a death-blow to the Obama presidency; its passage has given him time to discover the means for a renewal of presidential energy. Yet the bill passed without a single Republican vote, and its ...”

“... 2011, the MSC broke the cardinal rule of journalism and gave the Met details of Sun sources who may have been public officials. For years News International had blocked inquiries into hacking at the News of the World; now it was volunteering evidence about corruption at the Sun, which hadn’t even been under investigation. Among the first officials to be ...”

“... the majority of those infected, including nurses and other caregivers. Infectious-disease doctors may have had an unhealthy fascination with Ebola. But not entirely unhealthy, since Ebola and related pathogens seemed sure to be a bigger problem in the future. How could a zoonosis, once it jumped from animals to people and readily spread from human to ...”

“... a general with real ships and real soldiers who inflicted real damage on the people of Samos. It may seem absurd that on an embassy of such critical historical importance as that sent to Philip from Athens in 346 men were hired to tell jokes imported at some expense from the Sixty. But laughter lubricated the more resistant parts of international relations ...”

“... determined the future of dynasties, so royal murders plunged kingdoms into crisis. Politics may not have produced as many corpses as Hamlet or Jacobean tragedy, but there were enough of them and of attempted assassinations – the murders of William the Silent and Henri III and Henri IV of France; the attempt to poison Queen Elizabeth; the numerous ...”

“... as-told-to by a certain ‘Pauline’, written up in the third person by ‘Alice Michel’, who may have been the novelist ‘Rachilde’ (co-editor and co-founder of Le Mercure), it is not so much kiss-and-tell as pose-and-tell. And it is a curious text to evaluate, the more so when rendered into American English, with Degas as a ‘cranky and demanding ...”

“... but hardly friends, partly because Marianne is used to abrasive dealings with the world, and may actively prefer them that way. Rejected by her mother and brother (her father is dead), she can hardly be said to have such a thing as a self-image. She sees her reflection in the mirror in virtually non-human terms: ‘It’s a face like a piece of ...”

“... the vast majority of genetic variation is found within so-called races, not between them. You may well have more in common genetically with someone of a different skin colour than with someone of the same skin colour. But culture came first in thinking about race, and it comes first today. The idea of ‘whiteness’ continues to be used to make powerful ...”

“... reserves and navigated the shifting regulations of the European energy industry. Europeans may complain about Gazprom, but if it didn’t exist they would have to invent it.The first pipelines out of Russia ran through Belarus, Poland and Ukraine. At a time of Soviet dominance this wasn’t a problem. But when the USSR collapsed Ukraine’s ...”

“... with great suffering,’ the editors of the first edition of the Jamaica Labour Weekly wrote in May 1938, as unrest increased among workers across the island. ‘The present development of the country is ample evidence of black sweat poured out upon the land.’ But the land was still in the hands of a white planter elite, although a small Jamaican ...”