“... horrific realities of everyday life in a Nazi-conquered Britain (this found form as a novella, I, James Blunt). And in the summer of 1940 he wrote an article for Country Life entitled ‘The New “Merry England”’, in which he describes the invigorating camaraderie of Binsted, his home village, where he was the commander of the Local Defence ...”

“... our places at the dinner table at Salisbury Court in November 1583, ‘as in a late novel by Henry James’: ‘who had done what, who knew who had done what, and who knew who knew who had done what.’ Suspicion hung over the scene like a November fog, already a problem in Elizabethan London. (Those making a film of this book will want to know that.) The ...”

“... history, and the grandson of an industrial chemist, he boarded at a choir school, went to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and married a future Anglican clergywoman who wrote a PhD on Izaak Walton’s ecclesiastical Lives. Still, it’s misleading to speak of love letters to quiet men in pullovers, because characters, though deftly sketched, aren’t always the prime ...”

“... she enjoyed – if that’s the right word – the adulation of the crowds and an audience with James I. She was not, in fact, a princess, however much it suited the Virginia Company to pretend she was. Nor was her name Pocahontas, which means ‘playful girl’ and like so many other aspects of Indigenous culture had been misunderstood. Yet the name is a ...”

“... the best of Men to divest themselves of Self-Interest.’ Indeed, the foundations for Connecticut Hall, the oldest surviving building on Yale’s campus, were laid in 1750 by a team of free and enslaved workers. The anti-slavery movement took encouragement from the American Revolution. In New England, where the enslaved populations were smaller in size and ...”

“... the SNP’s victory at Govan last November, but they have managed to include a final article by James Naughtie which takes account of that event. Throughout, the book gives prominence to Home Rule as an issue and to SNP successes as a problem for Labour. Michael Keating takes on the difficult job of explaining Labour’s advance in Scotland and Tory decline ...”

“... Fools’ War’. In his excellent introduction to this selection of Larkin’s letters home, James Booth quotes from its first page to demonstrate the nature of Larkin Senior’s political views: ‘Those who had visited Germany were much impressed by the good government and order of the country as by the cleanliness and good behaviour of the people ...”

“... The Relation Ship, was published by his own Goliard Press in 1967. Three illustrations by Barry Hall. ‘Off-set printed, then blind-embossed and hand-coloured by the artist’. Four hundred and fifty copies hard-bound. ‘Ivory-tinted Glastonbury antique-laid paper’. Hairy boards (like one of Sonny Bono’s Flintstone-style waistcoats) and a tissue ...”

“... from Balliol. But like several clever men who went out to India – Virginia Woolf’s uncle James Fitzjames Stephen, for example – his intelligence only intensified his reactionary instincts. Brought up in the lawless backwoods of Co. Tipperary, O’Dwyer believed in Order first and last (and not much Law to go with it). He regarded any reforms ...”

“... if only because their celibacy is optional (though ‘there should be a biretta in the hall rather than a perambulator,’ one character says, perhaps loath to encourage interfering clergy wives).On the fringe of the fiction and outside the social pale are the nonconformists and evangelicals with their egalitarianism and tin-roofed chapels. Roman ...”

“... stacks of white concrete bricks; next to them, a heap of rubble, all that remained of a sports hall deemed not worth restoring. Our job was to pick bricks out of the debris and make new stacks for future rebuilding projects. The young people laid out yoga mats and camping kit under the trees, a firepit was dug, pails of well water fetched, volunteers set ...”

“... as a musty mid-century artefact, an image perhaps best represented by her most visible legacy, the Hall of the Pacific Peoples in New York, where her red cape and walking stick are preserved in a glass case, across from the display of dog and horse gear used by the Blackfoot Indians. Since her death in 1978, Mead’s reputation has foundered. In the ...”

“... and national media, but he was as dependent on graft and patronage as any old pol from Tammany Hall, for decades the home of the Democratic Party machine. Though he didn’t sup directly at the public trough, he had no scruples about ignoring or stretching the law to advance his agenda, creating no-show jobs for friends who could do him favours and no-bid ...”

“... seen by a mouse from its corner, and in 1898, going to Gladstone’s lying in state in Westminster Hall, he observes the ‘plain oak coffin’ and records an overheard remark: ‘Two carpenters in front of me said “a rough job – ¾ panels, & l½ framing”.’ It is hard to think of any other writer who would have foregrounded the workmen in quite that ...”

“... illusionistic feats that kept the magician-showmen Maskelyne and Cooke in business at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, for many years. Spiritualism also had affinities with Theosophy (and the ineffable Madame Blavatsky, into whose arcane orbit a handful of spiritualists wandered, only to be violently repelled). On the other hand, an outgrowth of early ...”