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“... and agile women (who had plainly ‘not been crippled in the usual manner’: this was in the north of the country) that he could hardly refrain from crying out: ‘Oh, brave new world, That has such people in it!’ To the resentment of the mandarins, he negotiated a curtailed form of the kowtow (down on one knee and the head bowed) when received by the ...”

“... the superlatives of their critics. Volume 36, for instance, investigated the Parish of St Paul, Covent Garden, and not only provided a magisterial history of Inigo Jones’s piazza, but also, in its account of the Bedford Estate, made a major contribution to the study of patrician urban landownership. And three years later, in the next volume, the ...”

“... Danzig, Natalia Ginzburg’s divided Italy, Elizabeth Bowen’s London, Nicholas Monsarrat’s North Atlantic, Norman Mailer’s Pacific, Olivia Manning’s Balkans, John Hersey’s Hiroshima ... Among other matters, these writers record the largest, most urgent set of human migrations the world has ever seen, and the responses of the displaced to ...”

“... British control of Palestine, had made him unpopular in Britain). My family milieu was very much North London professional-academic, and what was then called progressive. We were all admirers of Israel, as were the newspapers and magazines we read, the Guardian and the New Statesman. In the early 1960s, when I read Hecht’s memoir, the only support for ...”

“... pursued ideas of material progress, or ‘improvement’. In The Invention of Improvement (2015), Paul Slack interestingly showed how a word that originally referred to profitable agrarian innovation took on a more general meaning as a progressive slogan for beneficial change of any kind. ‘Improvement’ was the application of reason and ingenuity to the ...”

“... itself, radically deformed.Ion-Isidor Goldstein was born in 1925 in the town of Botoșani in north-east Romania. His father, Jindrich, was a successful businessman. His mother, Saly, ran the two family homes. She gave him the nickname Izu, which he went on to adopt as his nom de guerre. Isou’s first, ongoing fight was with his father, and he found an ...”

“... and 1640, the Empire of the kings of Spain stretched from the Philippines to the shores of the North Sea. The 19th-century Russian Empire covered more territory and the British had a larger population, but no other European empire was spread so widely or embraced so many different peoples. This behemoth has conventionally been called the Spanish Empire. At ...”

“... perished in the nearby concentration camp. In Pretoria Haggard called in at the cemetery where Oom Paul (Kruger) was buried, along with ‘others I had known’. The diary does not identify these others, but Coan does, and provides a photograph of the memorial to a law officer’s wife by whom Haggard had a short-lived child, Ethel Rider, buried alongside. The ...”

“... to the top floor via express elevator, himself becomes in effect the message, that evil capitalist Paul Newman can see his way to the ingenious stock scam which drives the plot on towards last-minute angelic intervention. The arrangement by phalanx required by lift protocol has the great virtue of precluding conversation. Cinema’s best elevator scenes ...”

“... life, playing polo, attending cocktail parties and spending weekends on the beaches of the north coast. The other ranks took their pleasures where they could find them. For the regular soldiers this usually meant the brothels of Kingston. On return to camp they were required to attend the grandly named Prophylactic Ablution Centre. Those who failed to ...”

“... the Circus at Bath, with its giant acorns, built between 1754 and 1768 to an esoteric design. John North noted in Stonehenge that the layout of the site is much more likely oriented not towards midsummer sunrise but midwinter sunset, which one might well think a time of fear and propitiation for Neolithic farmers rather than the joyous life celebration of ...”

“... of conscience over papal power prefigured the Vatican Council’s work so strikingly that Pope Paul VI could speak of it as ‘Newman’s Council’. Like many bodies of writing, Newman’s work was lent its most vital significance by events which lay in its future. Newman was aware that he was regarded in some circles as a saint, but thought he was quite ...”

“... and Edwardian ‘antis’ were far from being advocates of what Marx’s indolent son-in-law Paul Lafargue called ‘the right to be lazy’. Anyone hoping to uncover a hidden history of female hedonism will have to look elsewhere. The antis thought women should work from dawn till dusk for the public weal – but without the tools men had to ...”

“... for a war against slavery was the threat that slavery might be extended to the new territories of North America. That would diminish the hope that democracy could civilise itself in America by ‘lifting artificial weights from all shoulders’. It would also destroy the exemplary value of the United States as a large republic that governed itself peacefully ...”

“... member of this last group, my sister announced to the committee that its writer had borrowed, via Paul Virilio, a passage from Gaston Bachelard in which a water-bound creature is described as a ‘principle of vertigo’, dying at every instant as it sheds its substance. Melissa argued that the surfer’s symbolic relation to the shark confirmed Virilio’s ...”