“... literary event. Indeed, it was a literary event in a good many different, though related ways. As Robert Darnton has emphasised, it was a literary event in that it unlocked the printing presses and called forth a torrent of newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets and essays. Where France possessed no uncensored newspapers before 1789, almost two hundred journals ...”

“... the Continent with a succession of séances, two or three of which were attended by Elizabeth and Robert Browning. On the first occasion, an unseen hand lowered a clematis wreath (laurel was hard to come by) on Elizabeth’s brow. She believed in spiritual manifestations, but Robert, though he shared her dislike of ...”

“... contradictions of his being most subtly and most dramatically. In The Double in Literature (1970) Robert Rogers pointed out that the young captain narrator ‘symbolically summoned his double’ by leaving a rope-ladder dangling over the side, as if in a tale by Hoffmann, whom Conrad mentions elsewhere, and that the story conjures up the contrasting sides of ...”

“... and for the first few years of its existence the CRS was widely seen as a ‘police force in the service of the people’. This image did not survive for long (the force was purged of communist members after 1947), but illustrated the party’s dedication to the reconstruction of the state. The emblem of state resurgence in the postwar years was the policy ...”

“... recapture some of their former splendour? Such thoughts were very much in my mind while reading Robert Garland’s retelling of Athens’s tribulations during those two fraught years of Persian invasion. It is a story that has been told countless times, but never before has the narrative concentrated primarily on the Athenians’ wholesale evacuation of ...”

“... Labour prime minister. MacDonald was elected chairman and leader, as the press at the time, and Robert Mackenzie much later, stressed. MacDonald had the charisma, he had the contacts with the Left, and he profited from the general disenchantment with the war and those associated with it. That said, it is impossible to see the worthy Clynes as a ‘lost ...”

“... to have existed. From the Eighties of the last century right through until the post-WWII National Service years widened the intake, raised the age and lowered the voice of undergraduates, the Footlights was concerned almost exclusively with make-up and drag. Faced with this fact, which the photographs and song-sheets would not have allowed him to shirk even ...”

“... Princess Elizabeth should have become No 230873 Second Subaltern in the Auxiliary Transport Service, driving a heavy vehicle through rush-hour traffic and servicing it as necessary. After the war, Prince Philip comes prominently into the picture. Lady Longford vouches for the fact that he proposed to the Princess and not she to him, and one can believe ...”

“... the Nazi leaders. As early as July 1933, with Hitler only just ensconced as German Chancellor, Robert Bruce-Lockhart records conversations between the Prince and the grandson of the former Kaiser, Prince Louis-Ferdinand: ‘The Prince of Wales was quite pro-Hitler and said it was no business of ours to interfere in Germany’s internal affairs either re ...”

“... in Bowler’s book demonstrates how strongly biological theory could be pressed into political service. This was not solely a 19th-century phenomenon. When the notions of racial hierarchy and lineal development were replaced in the 1920s by a Darwinian branching tree, a new generation took this as a further legitimation of their imperial demands: the ...”

“... not devolve to autonomous agencies. Many services, indeed, might stand to gain, since the Civil Service has (or had) responsibilities that could best be discharged by others. But the configuration of such agencies has to be tightly drawn and the lines of accountability clearly understood; and in practice, as he notes, many of the quangos are not accountable ...”

“... trying to steal apples; standing rapt before a fruit stall, gazing at ripe pears. Today it’s Robert and Jon who are on a spree: they steal a yoghurt, a milkshake, two cartons of Ambrosia rice. Finally they steal a child, blond-haired, not quite three. One of them takes him by the hand. They lead him into the city. They walk some busy roads, they are seen ...”

“... Baby rats. Thrashy rats. Ugly, dirty scratchy rats. Funny, jumpy cute rats.’ And then there is Robert Sullivan’s delightful and revolting Rats, the most exhaustive, nauseating and pleasurable compendium of rat facts ever set down. Facts such as: wherever there are human beings, there are rats. China is where the rat originated, and where you can find it ...”

“... Victoria in 1897. The thumping Unionist electoral triumph of 1895 was confidently ascribed by Sir Robert Ensor (who had been a Winchester schoolboy at the time) to an upsurge of expansionist imperialism, while A.G. Gardiner, the biographer of Sir William Harcourt, spoke of ‘a tidal wave of Jingoism’, as ‘the arrogant nationalism of Mr Kipling and the ...”

“... halfpenny.’ The directors of the London Telephone Company were hoping to provide a similar service. The term ‘kiosk’ drew at once on a faint association with the Turkish pavilion or summerhouse, and more palpably on the familiar stands selling newspapers, or tea and buns. ‘Today,’ the Daily News trumpeted on 1 April 1891, ‘the new Telephone ...”