“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to advise in a junta. It was quite another for them spontaneously to raise doubts in the lecture hall. But Charles’s edict recalling existing papers and forbidding further discussion was a dead letter. The arguments went on. The Crown agreed to abolish the encomienda in 1545. Las Casas and others started to refuse absolution to some ...”

“... critic who had written an insufficiently respectful review of a black swing concert at Carnegie Hall.) Even Ellington, who showed no fondness of the white party-liners – there was notorious friction between him and Hammond – supported various red-tinged causes so frequently that he attracted the attention of the FBI, a fact noted by Stowe, who has ...”

“... for a decade. She develops her career as a pianist. Devotes herself to her child. Learns to love James, her not altogether thrilling husband. And when she discovers she is going deaf, she meets this intense misfortune with dignity and a proportionate distress. It’s at the point where her deafness is beginning seriously to disrupt her life that Julia meets ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... On a February morning in 1788, dozens of spectators filed into the gallery of Westminster Hall. Among them appeared the cream of London society, headed by Queen Charlotte herself, elegant in fawn-coloured satin and a modest splash of diamonds, and flanked by three of her daughters. With three hundred guards keeping the passages clear, the peers of the realm marched in according to rank ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”