“... leadership of Artorius Castus, their enemies later being misunderstood as not Caledonians from the north, but Saxons from the east? The first supposition is highly unlikely, the second even more so. There is ‘not a shred of evidence for it’, Higham reports. (It becomes one of his favourite phrases.)The Sarmatian theory was taken up in Antoine Fuqua’s ...”

“... and other towns must be asked their opinion’ before London makes any decisions. In Gaskell’s North and South, it’s only when the spectre of centralisation is raised that the sturdily ineloquent mill-owner Mr Thornton can rise to the rhetorical level of Margaret Hale: I belong to Teutonic blood; it is little mingled in this part of England to what it ...”

“... What is wrong with the idea of a world state? John Rawls, the world’s most celebrated living political philosopher, believes that the answer is relatively straightforward. ‘I follow Kant’s lead in Perpetual Peace,’ he writes, ‘in thinking that a world government – by which I mean a unified political regime with the legal powers normally exercised by central government – would either be a global despotism or else would rule over a fragile empire torn by frequent civil strife as various regions and peoples tried to gain their political freedom and autonomy ...”

“... herself barred from most of the best hotels in Europe. Ava Gardner had a lot of fun. She came from North Carolina, the last of six children in a poor farming family. Discovered when her photograph was spotted in a New York photo-store window (it had been taken by the store’s manager, Larry Tarr, who was the boyfriend of Ava’s older sister), she was ...”

“... Several hundred men and their telescopes in a supermarket car park in Kent watching the first North American golden-winged warbler to be recorded in Europe, a few grams of yellow feathers blown across the Atlantic: the anoraks and their obsession are weird but recognisably British. If birding is associated with the comedy of teenage gawkiness it also has ...”

“... all in, so I will focus on one early phase, a key moment when, after a brief sojourn in Rome and North Africa with Cy Twombly, another close friend, Rauschenberg returned to New York in spring 1953 and set up a studio on Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan. Before his tour abroad Rauschenberg had attended Black Mountain College in ...”

“... should resist this kind of creeping socialisation. A Belgian musician and designer of automata, John Joseph Merlin, first skated on an early version of roller blades while playing the violin in 1760. But if roller-skating has a long history, it has only a short literature. Unlike cricket, it does not command literary partisans of the calibre of Harold ...”

“... contained a variety of small worlds, in Lancashire as different as Bolton. ‘the Geneva of the North’, and the coastal Fylde, in 1600 as Popish as Ireland. It has been a widespread assumption that the true story of the English Reformation, an accurate account of its pace, progress and ultimate profundity, will consist of the sum of these many parts, the ...”

“... Garret FitzGerald and Ian Paisley, while managing not to criticise Gerry Adams, fawning upon John Hume, and eulogising Charles Haughey – currently the object of scandalised enquiry – if with veiled threat: ‘Haughey has still to show that he knows where the British see their interest to lie. But, in the interval, he skilfully combines de Valera’s ...”

“... The Auk, however, has always had his own champions: notably, his two previous biographers, John Connell and Roger Parkinson, and Correlli Barnett, who, in The Desert Generals (1960), went so far as to describe Montgomery’s Alamein as ‘an unnecessary battle’. Now Philip Warner has attempted a reassessment of Auchinleck’s career in the light of ...”

“... during the characters’ breakdowns, but it still manages to be witty when Amelia finds herself in North London, squabbling out loud with a voice in her head while buying tins of beans ‘in one of those dowdy, dingy, angst-ridden, “what’s the point of living” supermarkets, popular with poor people who didn’t have any money, and also with rich people ...”

“... affairs under Donald Trump. The general direction was set in March 2024 by the defence secretary, John Healey, who said Labour’s aim was to restore the British armed forces to their standing before 2010, when they were still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. From the outset the SDR was the object of a proxy battle between the armed forces and the ...”

“... the great proconsuls, but young men representatively on the loose – James Brooke of Sarawak, John and Henry Lawrence of the Punjab, Charles Gordon, Lawrence of Arabia, William Sleeman who destroyed Thuggee, Frederick Lugard who conquered Northern Nigeria. If such men became proconsuls it often diminished rather than brightened their radiance. At that ...”

“... signature – was born in the parish of St George, Canterbury, in February 1564. He was the son of John Marlowe, shoemaker, and Katherine née Arthur, a Dover woman. They had nine children, though only five survived childhood. Christopher was the eldest son, and after the death of his sister Mary in 1568, the eldest child in the family. His father was ...”

“... was backed by Marshall, but the plan was demolished by Alan-brooke, who secured acceptance of the North Africa campaign on 22 July – a date which Eisenhower thought would go down as ‘the blackest day in history’. In Ambrose’s view the North Africa campaign brought minimal rewards at high cost, but he ...”