“... several of which remain indispensable – Schlesinger was among the chief assemblers of the King James Version of American liberalism. His Cold War manual, The Vital Center, is one of the period’s shrewdest pieces of liberal propaganda. He effectively made the aspirationless politics of the 1950s look like a tough-minded creed that could sustain the ...”

“... through the Deep South en route to Mexico. In his ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, Martin Luther King had called it the biggest segregated city in the United States; it was certainly the meanest. After weeks of Freedom Riders and crusading black children, Governor George Wallace had called out the state guard to help Police Chief Bull Connor with his fire ...”

“... an eye for the vagaries of upper-class behaviour. The editor, Philip Ziegler, tells us that the King (George V) felt that an extended imperial tour by his first-born would not only strengthen ties of friendship but weaken the infatuation felt by his son for Mrs Dudley Ward. This cure for love called for the services of the battle cruiser Renown, which used ...”

“... but able to accommodate Robert (son of Edwin) Lutyens’s stores for Marks and Spencer as well as Richard Neutra’s blonde American beach houses. Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Freya Stark, even Penelope Chetwode (Mrs Betjeman) shared the pages with respected authorities on building materials, the English town (‘one must not be too gay or ...”

“... childhood which have been written by men, within a particular mode. She has especially in mind Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy, which she describes as representing a ‘passivity of emotional life in working-class communities’, where ‘the streets are all the same; nothing changes.’ More sharply, Carolyn Steedman also chal-challenges Jeremy ...”

“... that turned White River and other Arkansas streams into cesspools. Don Tyson, the Arkansas chicken king, poured money into the Governor’s campaigns and received not only river poisoning protection but $412 million worth of tax breaks. Mike Espy, the first black secretary of agriculture, was forced to resign for accepting favours from Don Tyson. During the ...”

“... hardest to acquire. It was touch and go. He died in 1940, just before the British Empire. In 1953, Richard Usborne published a book called Clubland Heroes, which expanded some of the criticisms made of John Buchan in the Thirties: that he was snobbish, blimpish, mildly anti-semitic and a worshipper of worldly success. What infuriated his widow was not so much ...”

“... place both in France and in Britain, but certainly not in the same manner. Social historians like Richard Cobb have done such amazing work on the French Revolution, studying the minutest lineaments of ‘the real thing’, that one begins to look for their sort of history in a historical novel and to feel thwarted when such topics are ruled out of court by ...”

“... Itahad, or ‘Unity’. Al Itahad may be no threat to the Americans militarily, but according to Richard Dowden of the Independent it could become a rallying point for disaffected Somalis. The risk of Somalia falling to intemperate Islam – this has been a straw many have clutched at in attempting to explain President Bush’s motives for launching ...”

“... through the war, though they were rather eclipsed in 1916 by John Buchan’s Greenmantle, in which Richard Hannay bluffed his way to Constantinople to prevent a wild Islamic prophet, backed by Germany, from setting the East in flames. In the real world the Germans were backing a more potent troublemaker by smuggling Lenin to St Petersburg, thus establishing ...”

“... across the title page. Wolfreston owned twelve Shakespeare quartos, including editions of Hamlet, King Lear and Romeo and Juliet, as well as Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and The Jew of Malta, Donne’s Poems and Mary Wroth’s Urania among many other works.She was also an enthusiastic tagger, recording not only her name but sometimes the hands through which a ...”

“... set in the Middle Ages; bicycled around France studying its medieval architecture; hero-worshipped Richard the Lionheart; rubbed medieval brasses; was fascinated by medieval heraldry, glass, coins and weapons; wrote his undergraduate thesis on crusader castles (his introduction to ‘Arabia’); and, before the war came along to interrupt his academic ...”

“... on the topic, though it is always near at hand. The most surprising contribution is an essay on Richard Strauss, who certainly had spent a long life studying ‘the possibilities’. He set some well-known stylistic puzzles: Elektra belongs to 1909, the same date as Schoenberg’s Erwartung, yet the more traditional Der Rosenkavalier followed in 1911. There ...”

“... flight to Varennes. Nor should he have been, for Part One was published several months before the king fled and Paine was manhandled. According to Hitchens, Part Two was produced partly to explain to Dr Johnson the need for a written constitution, and partly to endorse Ricardo’s views on commerce and free trade, but when it was written Johnson had been dead ...”

“... has reached for a thematic solution. She relies throughout on the term ‘meme’, deployed by Richard Dawkins to mean the cultural equivalent of a gene: an idea or theme that mutates and changes in time and place while remaining fundamentally recognisable. From this follows the organisation of The English Romance in Time into eight chapters, succeeding a ...”