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“... It has long been accepted that neither the Union of Crowns of 1603, which saw the Scottish King James VI move south to London, nor the Treaty of Union of 1707 served to cancel out Scottish distinctiveness. In educational, ecclesiastical, intellectual and legal terms, and not only those, Scotland has always retained significant differences. Moreover, Great ...”

“... have begun to appear, and now they have been joined by a chronological overview from Harold James, a British economic historian who teaches at Princeton. The sober style of his book could not be more different from Manchester’s, and its focus on the technological and economic history of the business is a world away from Manchester’s relentless ...”

“... the moment at which Continental demonology was brought to Scotland: it was in 1590, when James VI returned from Denmark with his bride. It is possible, since an arranged marriage is likely to be more traumatic for a homosexual than it is for most of us, that this moment also pinpoints a major attack of sexual guilt in ...”

“... bohemianism, the utopianists of Lady Mary Fox’s Account of an Expedition to the interior of New Holland (1837) hold casual buffets rather than dinner parties. In Sarah Scott’s A Description of Millennium Hall (1778), utopia is a country mansion in Cornwall, an anodyne English pastoral in which female midgets play the harpsichord and tend the ...”

“... rejected, and at some point in 1705 or early 1706, he left Scotland. ‘There is no evidence,’ James Buchan writes, ‘he ever returned.’ Law was born in 1671, the son of William Law, a master goldsmith who, like other goldsmiths of his time, drifted from metallurgy into finance, becoming a lender to clients. Success in this sphere enabled the purchase ...”

“... the summer of 1983. The narrator, William Beckwith, is a young aristocrat of leisure. He lives in Holland Park, swims at the Corinthian Club, a gay gym on Great Russell Street (‘the masterpiece of the architect Frank Orme, whom I once met at my grandfather’s’), and picks up men everywhere. In a public lavatory in Hyde Park, he picks up, in a quite ...”

“... his fine Baroque church with a view to selling off the site, defected in dudgeon to Rome. Francis Holland, preacher at a fashionable proprietary chapel off Mayfair, succeeded admirably in capturing the rich for religion and was put on the list of royal chaplains. Thomas Darling struggled manfully as a curate in the evil rookery of St ...”

“... Ramstein and get his orders from Washington. There are US warheads in Turkey, Italy, Belgium and Holland, all assigned to Nato under similar arrangements. There are also 110 B61s stored at RAF Lakenheath, set up to be delivered by US F-15E aircraft, even though since 1998 the RAF itself no longer has a nuclear mission. Originally, the B61s were to be used in ...”

“... by her death years later. In Sweden, Sicily and Russia he travelled intermittently with the Misses Holland, daughters of a successful physician, but never allowed them to get in the way of his plans. They were lively and resourceful, the kind of ladies who could safely be abandoned in Kiev to find their own way home. In middle age Hare played ‘the hospitable ...”

“... light which spreads itself over the world, especially in those two free nations of England and Holland, upon whom the affairs of Europe now turn; and if Heaven sends us a peace soon … it is impossible but letters and knowledge must advance in greater proportion than ever.’ Peace was still seven years off, but Shaftesbury’s ‘mighty light’ would ...”

“... compiling lists, but the lists themselves are interesting. For example: Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, James Wong Howe, Dudley Nichols, Clifford Odets, Robert Rossen, John Garfield, Charlie Chaplin and Leo McCarey all attended a reception in July 1943 for the Soviet director and administrator Mikhail Kalatozov. At that time Russian and American propaganda methods ...”

“... celebrate a civil partnership in the Palace of Westminster, and his latest book tells the story of James Pratt and John Smith, the last men to be executed for sodomy in Britain. Pratt was a servant and Smith a labourer; both were out of work when they were arrested, and only Pratt knew how to write. Pratt was 32 and Smith forty. Pratt was married with a ...”

“... a walk along the local beach or by taking minor trips or otherwise agreeable spells abroad: Henry James in France, D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico, Lawrence Durrell in Corfu, Michel Butor in Istanbul, Henry Miller in Greece. In December 1933, leaving his father in Simla and his mother in London, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off to walk from the Hook of ...”

“... New York society. The Schermerhorns belonged to the blue blood of America, having arrived from Holland in the 17th century. For Caroline (Mrs William Backhouse Astor Jr) the function of society was to keep other people out. She worked hand in glove with a deplorable-sounding gentleman called Ward McAllister who set himself up as a quasi-professional social ...”

“... radicalism of the English sects was not parallelled by anything produced in no less sectarian Holland or Transylvania. But this leaves unaddressed the question of what that possibly mythical being a ‘European’ – or more realistically an Italian, Dutch or Polish historian – is to make of these strange and terrible transactions and the modes of ...”