“... sets the scene: ‘the free people of a small island’ defy the tyranny of a Continental power and ‘a woman guides and inspires them.’ Robson, firm of jaw and bristling with double-decker ruffs and farthingales, outwits the dastardly Spanish and the Armada is defeated. In 1953, with memories of war beginning to recede, there was another film ...”

“... Arcadian or prelapsarian archetype. Letting nature take its course can lead to a bad place. Henry Neville’s fiction The Isle of Pines (1668) shows English castaways on a south sea island rapidly reverting to primal barbarism: a Cockaigne-like land of plenty lulls civilised men into destitution. As Miéville suggests, Utopia and its endurance typify ...”

“... found others to take the wheel, but there was a perversity in Pevsner’s choice. Sizewell B power station He and his assistants would collate papers, documents and photographs on the buildings they were to visit before setting off on trips of six weeks or so, the boxes of research on the back seat, the car – there were a number of different models ...”

“... and outside, temperate and tropical, man-made and natural. ‘A complex of few interweavings’ is Henry James’s curtly paradoxical summary of the Florida scene. Heavy, stagnant air and violent hurricanes. Paradisiac contentment and accesses of sudden panic. The strange recumbent crescent moons. The deep shadows in the daytime. The snuffling or crisping ...”

“... established the right of owners to have runaways captured and returned. His idol was Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, known as the Great Compromiser. Clay died in 1852, and Lincoln must have realised that his fifty-year effort to rid his state of slavery had accomplished nothing. But well into the Civil War, Lincoln clung to Clay’s plan for ...”

“... House, but there would be more.The site of the Tudor palace had been a locus of human activity and power since the Stone Age. A timber fortress stood there, on the banks of the River Loddon with views across the valley, from the 12th century until 1531, when Henry VIII granted William Paulet a licence to rebuild. A feudal ...”

“... to as ‘a sycophant’. He is similarly tough with Stanley Hoffman for being too respectful of Henry Kissinger. Hitchens is at his best when on the attack. He can’t stand Cyril Connolly, whom he sees as a precious old reactionary: ‘another dose of the familiar compound ... some rackety travelling, a tincture of furtive sex (with much sniggering about ...”

“... of his age), presenting him instead as a quite important civil servant with good connections to power, and from a family almost typically English in its concentration not on literary matters but on moving up the social scale. Chaucer’s great-grandfather, Andrew ‘le Taverner’, thus seems to have kept a pub in Ipswich, while his ...”

“... Jimmy Carter put it very gruffly, when he said that both America and Vietnam had suffered equally. Henry Kissinger, in his memoir Years of Upheaval, phrased it even more prettily: ‘Hanoi and Washington had inflicted grievous wounds on each other; theirs were physical, ours psychological and thus perhaps harder to heal.’ This connects perfectly to the ...”

“... peace: it is customary for state authority thus to associate peace with terror. In Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, the King’s infant daughter is praised in a powerful prophecy: ‘She shall be loved and feared,’ and her royal attributes shall be ‘peace, plenty, love, truth, terror’. Our disputations about the nuclear deterrent are connected with the ...”

“... remarks but, more subtly, in the way he manipulates the romancers’ clichés in novels like Henry Esmond, Resistance to the knightly ideal was no Victorian invention: witness Falstaff’s dissection of the ‘honour’ for which Hotspur and Prince Hal were prepared to die. But side by side with the Victorian ideal, for ever colliding with it and ...”

“... somehow gripping. One of the reasons for the dynamism of the Auden poem is the driving verbs that power the lines along; Cunard’s poem is mostly nouns and adjectives, and remains static despite the speeds and distances it evokes. It’s not the first time that Hull has been dully rhymed with ‘dull’, and it won’t be the last, but what this poem mostly ...”

“... poems he attributed to a mythical 15th-century Bristol monk, and the equally immature William Henry Ireland, who forged manuscripts by Shakespeare before which Boswell knelt in adoration, apologists have found a degree of extenuation in claiming that theirs were the follies of ambitious but misguided youth. Still, their guilt remains unquestioned, as does ...”

“... VI by J.R.M. Butler of Trinity College, Cambridge; and the Queen as Princess Elizabeth by Sir Henry Marten of Eton. Time for a change? Lady Longford gives us to understand that Prince Charles is an expert on the subject, as he probably needs be in self-defence; it is to be hoped that he has supplemented these studies by meditation on the appropriate bits ...”

“... and stylised antinomies. Among the most familiar are Aristotle’s nature and convention, Sir Henry Maine’s status and contract, Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, Michael Oakeshott’s ‘Societas’ and ‘Universitas’, Durkheim’s ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ solidarity, and Hobbesian vertical ‘command’ models of authority ...”