“... to outdo all autodidacts. His next, barely more palatable option was to join his elder brother James in his Boston printing works. Josiah had whipped Benjamin regularly, and now James beat him too, for smuggling saucy comment pieces into the New-England Courant under the alias of a worthy widow called Silence Dogood ...”

“... place in any reputable account of the origins of the ‘Puritan Revolution’; and high time too. William Hunt, whose book is ostensibly about pre-Civil War Essex but really about many things besides, calls it The Puritan Moment. The argument nowadays is not about the political importance of religious conflicts but about their nature. If there is an orthodoxy ...”

“... Richard Wilson and Sawrey Gilpin, all of whom are adjudged to be of ‘good family’, and Sir James Thornhill, who came from ‘good Dorset stock’, a phrase more at home in a book on country cooking than in a serious work of scholarship. Why pedigree mattered to him is rarely clear, as by his own account it seems to have no particular influence on the ...”

“... there is the old-fashioned Calvinism of that doyen of Puritan scholars, the Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher. Although the first system was less dogmatic than the second, both of them closed their adherents’ minds. Between them lay the third, altogether healthier response: the sceptical, rational Anglicanism of the Great Tew Circle, of Clarendon and his ...”

“... Adrian and Pandora, his priggish girlfriend, the cardboard foils. It is the situation of Just William reversed. The children strive for an appearance of competence, the adults achieve anarchy. Because there are jokes on every page the bleak facts take a little time to emerge; and the very excellence of the television acting tended to make one miss ...”

“... the reasons they gave for their alarm. It was pretended that the LCS was armed, and comprised, as William Pitt expressed it, a ‘Jacobin army’, but its members taken together seem to have owned fewer weapons than decorated the walls of an average country house. At the treason trials, the law officers claimed that the LCS was leading a plot to depose the ...”

“... as usual in incendiary mood, poured scorn on him and his associates. ‘You and Mr Conrad and Mr James and all those old fellows are done,’ he was to be heard insisting. ‘Exploded! ... Fichus! ... No good! ... Finished!’ Lewis’s beef was with literary ‘impressionism’: with novels which sought intricately to render the movements, at once furtive ...”

“... with the lefty technocrats, Johnson went with the utopian socialists too. It was in the spirit of William Morris, Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin that those family gaggles of Routemaster fans came out to bid the old version of the bus farewell, in the belief that efficiency and the bottom line aren’t enough, that the artefacts a city holds in common must be ...”

“... fears for his family and disillusionment with the practical realities of becoming a Muslim William Wallace in somebody else’s war stifled his yearning to be a righteous soldier. During the Bosnian conflict he visited the barracks of the Kateebah mujahedin, the Bosnian foreign legion, but stayed only three weeks and did not fight, although he ...”

“... dazzling, and she developed a crush on her of almost schoolgirl intensity. In November 1688, when William of Orange landed in England to oust Anne’s father, King James II, the Marlboroughs seized their chance. Sarah helped the Princess to escape from Whitehall and brought her safely to ...”

“... established Church,’ we are reminded, ‘Malthus was as much the successor to Abraham Tucker and William Palcy as to Adam Smith, and as much the contemporary of someone like Bishop Sumner, who did so much to make his doctrines acceptable in Anglican circles, as of his friend Ricardo.’ Macaulay, on the other hand, is to be visualised, as he so often ...”

“... have been shared by the British Government of the day nor, probably, by the US Defence Secretary, James Forrestal, nor by many high officials in the State Department who deplored the activities of President Truman and the Zionist lobby. If America’s role was marginal, it was also appreciable. Shlaim’s treatment of 1948 is, indeed, slightly ...”

“... he only needed control of the Channel for six hours to effect an invasion of England. After all, William of Orange had managed it in the autumn of 1688; and Bonnie Prince Charlie had got as far south as Derby with his ragamuffin army in December 1745. The notion of an impregnable island fortress was less convincing when 1688 and 1745 remained fresh in the ...”

“... Reformation, The Stripping of the Altars, they have now made things even with David Daniell’s William Tyndale. Tyndale’s life is soon told. He was born, probably in 1494, of a landowning and entrepreneurial family in that part of Gloucestershire where the Cotswolds meet the Severn, since then the home of Evelyn Waugh (temporarily: the ghost of Tyndale ...”

“... of Shadows is an intricate interweaving of biographical portraits and individual stories: of William Moorcroft, the horse doctor with a mission to find new stock for the cavalry in British India; Charles Metcalfe, the advocate of a forward policy on the frontier in the early 19th century; Alexander ‘Bokhara’ Burnes, the foolhardy political ...”