“... revolution was the major factor in all the other revolutions with which we are concerned, more important than the Turkish conquest, the discovery and colonisation of America or the imperial vocation of Spain. Had it not been for the increase in the number of men, would any of these glorious chapters ever have been written?... The increase lay behind ...”

“... lazily flaps up from having poked a hole in a green garbage bag’ – makes living in it somehow more tolerable. The implication is not quite that the unexamined life is not worth living, rather that an unexamined world isn’t worth living in. ‘Well, he is still alive, seeing what he sees. He supposes this is a good thing, but it is an effort.’ These ...”

“... founding be one of the causes of its current hyper-partisan polarisation? There are, of course, more immediate causes in populism and the echo chambers of the social media age; but a fossilised system that enshrines for all time the indefeasible wisdom of the founders makes modest reforms and compromises almost impossible.Things were different only a couple ...”

“... and his place in it while staring into space, he instead thinks about the meaning of life, or more often the lack of it, as he’s peering into the brightly lit mouths of his patients: My last patient of the day was a five-year-old complaining of a loose tooth. I had the parents pegged for the type that would send their child to see a brain specialist if ...”

“... By​ 1875 the eighty-year-old Thomas Carlyle was ready to die. In fact, he was rather looking forward to death, at least officially, more than once referring to it as ‘release’. To judge by the sixty letters to his brother that Carlyle wrote (or, rather, dictated, his own hand having become too unsteady) between December 1875 and March 1879, there was much to be released from ...”

“... was given to me by a student translating Euripides on a mid-term exam. Those were the days.Once Thomas Hardy was strolling on the heath with a telescope and he put the telescope to his eye. He saw a man in white on the gallows at Dorchester and at that moment the man dropped down and the town clock struck eight. ‘Faintly.’ A faint note from the town ...”

“... wondered, would it look if it didn’t? The logic of this situation suggests that we need more proof and more argument, and more experience of living with doubt, but the over-whelming mass of the interest in the Kennedy assassination over the last 28 years has gone exactly the ...”

“... Fitzroy. Howard blood was blue enough to pose a threat to the succession, as Surrey’s uncle Thomas discovered when he was imprisoned in 1536 after a rash engagement to Lady Margaret Douglas, who also had royal blood. Surrey was unimaginably grand, but was also not unjustly described by John Barlowe, Dean of Westbury as ‘the most foolish proud boy that ...”

“... Working as I have been recently on the cultural history of this area, I was interested to know more and went down to Lulworth to meet Mr Weld. Mr Weld finds himself in the same situation as many other landowners. Agriculture is dwindling and the search is on for new forms of income. He describes the survey as a ‘management tool’ which will help him ...”

“... Thomas Bewick was a creature of paradox: an artist who laboured as a craftsman, a proud provincial whose work achieved national fame, a portrayer of the countryside who spent most of his life in an industrial town, and a rational man of the Enlightenment who fed the fierce streams of Romanticism. Thanks to four people – Bewick himself, who wrote a marvellous autobiographical Memoir, his two spinster daughters, who nursed and guarded his reputation with ferocious filial piety, and now Iain Bain, whose sympathetic but rigorous scholarship is epitomised by his two-volume monograph on Bewick’s watercolours and drawings – as much is probably known about Bewick, despite his minor status among the luminaries of British art, as about any other native artist ...”

“... closely at the full range of their effects, to determine whether they have ‘worked’ in some more qualified sense. He distinguishes three further senses, short of strategic victory, in which terrorism might be said to work: partial strategic victory, tactical success and the inherent rewards of struggle as such – and there are further subdivisions ...”

“... during the darkest period of his mourning. The volume includes letters to Joseph Priestley, Thomas Lawrence, John Thelwall, Samuel Parr (‘the Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, ...”

“... Or for a Thatcherite tract on Britain’s decline from Victorian values. Or for a great novel like Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. The rise and fall of a mercantile dynasty is a rich old subject, and can be approached from several angles. Which will Simon Blow’s be? ‘If I was more Tennant than anything else,’ he ...”

“... real and so-called, there are fewer resources to go around and the use of those resources is more intensively policed. As a result, the environment in which today’s students and academics work has sharply deteriorated. When I think of the freedom I enjoyed as a young Oxford don, with no one telling me how to teach or what I should research or how I ...”

“... mortuary historian Gary Laderman calls the bodies of the dead, have become portable, divisible and more scattered than the centuries of our species’ dead before them. The way we dispose of the dead has changed and their place in the landscapes of our towns and consciousness has been downsized and, in some ways, disappeared. Like Purified by Fire: A History ...”