“... This is perhaps the fullest and most vital study of a single community in Tudor and Stuart England that we yet possess. The Liberty of Havering, moreover, is large enough, and varied enough, to escape many of the typical criticisms of the significance of the local study. It stretched from the Thames, at Hornchurch Marsh, through the village of Hornchurch, to the main road to Chelmsford and Colchester, straddled by the busy market town of Romford, to the village of Havering-atte-Bower, well off the beaten track to the north ...”

“... Tenth Legion, fought with the Scottish Highlanders for the rights and hopes of the House of Stuart, [fallen] on Crecy’s field in the Hundred Years War, and [taken] part in all the great campaigns since then.’ As if that was not enough, all Patton’s warrior forebears materialised at moments of crisis to lend him moral support. After leading an ...”

“... In​ 1989, Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques published an anthology of articles from Marxism Today, the magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which Jacques edited. ‘The world has changed,’ they wrote in the introduction to New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s. ‘Britain and other advanced capitalist societies’ were ‘increasingly characterised by diversity, differentiation and fragmentation, rather than homogeneity, standardisation and the economies and organisations of scale which characterised modern mass society ...”

“... by Rome to be a bastard well deserving execution and displacement by her cousin, the Catholic Mary Stuart of Scotland). Only 30 or 40 years after this crowded hour, Mercutio, in Romeo and Juliet, says: ‘A plague on both your houses.’ He was not, of course, speaking ecclesiastically, but the phrase has a usefulness. So does Donne’s actually ecclesiastical ...”

“... the tight streets of the ancient castle town. Wine flowed and hogsheads of beer and baskets of white bread were put out for the poor. Some five thousand troops gathered, on horse and foot, as Sir John Strangways, a local royalist, proclaimed the end of eleven years of the republic. A contemporary source describes a procession of ‘maidens, at least a ...”

“... tangerines, ‘apples stained with strawberry pink. Some yellow pears, smooth as silk, some white grapes covered with a silver bloom and a big cluster of purple ones’, the latter chosen deliberately ‘to tone in with the new dining room carpet’. This last thought, she reflects, is a little ‘far-fetched’, but when she has finished the ...”

“... who had characterised the state’s 7520 Chinese migrants as servile ‘coolies’ undercutting white workers. ‘The poor Chinaman does not come here as a slave,’ Tong Achick and Chun Aching wrote in An Analysis of the Chinese Question. ‘He comes because of his desire for independence.’ Thirty years later another pamphlet, The Chinese Question in ...”

“... into the upper reaches of Loch Glendhu and Loch Glencoul. The expedition had been organised by Stuart Murray, a naturalist who was for several seasons warden at St Kilda. He’d arranged this trip as anyone else might organise a dinner party. Having chartered the boat he invited 12 people – ornithologists, archaeologists, writers, photographers – he ...”

“... film was dangerous. Tina Brown, former editor of the New Yorker, described her, with a ‘tight white face and 19th-century hairdo’ making ‘her look like Carry Nation on the South Beach diet’, launching into ‘a tirade about how Inside Deep Throat had failed to point out that Linda Lovelace had been a victim of “throat rape”’. The heavy ...”

“... by a rare combination of circumstances: they were both educated and free.Many black men married white Englishwomen. Diatribes against intermarriage appeared, written by men such as the plantation owner Edward Long. This shouldn’t be taken as clear proof of widespread hostility to interracial couples. Their descendants also intermarried and ...”

“... Nancy Mitford, however, I was too sad and too regal to masturbate.Since her death in 1587, Mary Stuart has caused strange stirrings and vehement imaginings in those who have applied themselves to her case. In Schiller’s play, her jailer Paulet worries about an escape:I curse the task that is entrusted me,To keep this scheming vixen in my care.I wake in ...”

“... where poetry was concerned: Bunting broke a long silence with Briggflatts in 1965 (published by Stuart Montgomery’s Fulcrum Press); Prynne’s Kitchen Poems (1968) was exciting readers in the CB2 postcode; the TLS was publishing concrete poems; and in 1971 Eric Mottram would begin his influential tenure at Poetry Review. But it wasn’t to last. ‘The ...”

“... Robert Stradling, Beatrix Campbell, Deirdre Beddoe, Stephen Sedley, Lynette Hunter, Andy Croft, Stuart Hall, Antony Easthope and Christopher Norris. The attacks are now commonplace. Raymond Williams and other writers have been making them for several years. What they amount to is this: Orwell, ostensibly a man of the Left, made his work available to the ...”

“... of the son’s avant-gardism. Having gone for a prevailing, historically appropriate black-and-white, Reitz himself is avant-garde enough to fleck the film with colour as a heightening for critical moments. In the context of the film at large, however, these dabs and flecks could be thought an alien feature – caviare to the general, Stockhausen to the ...”

“... Despite obvious exceptions – memoirs by John Stuart Mill and R.G. Collingwood, confessions by St Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau – autobiography is not a genre that comes naturally to most philosophers. The typical modern philosopher – the Kant of the three critiques, say, or the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus – seeks perfection in the composition of systematic treatises and closely-argued works of logic, not in the harvesting of personal memories, which (if one is honest) are inherently uncertain, often contradictory, and usually tinged with emotion ...”