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“... gabions, still wear identity tags around their trunks proclaiming ‘Evelyn Estate’. The broad valleys and steep hills around Wotton are well-watered, tree-covered and beautiful. But don’t be misled. From the early 17th century onwards, swift water courses like the Tillingbourne at Wotton powered what were in effect industrial complexes, mills ...”

“... Red Regiment were much younger, just apprentices. None had fought before; only a few in Sir William Waller’s whole army had experienced battle. They trusted in providence, thought of home and tried to obey the orders barked at them. There was dense fog, and the men were only yards from their objective when the cluster of buildings, with their ...”

“... As they tell their word-perfect stories, a series of familiar archive images floods the screen: broad-brimmed, broad-smiled West Indians with their natty suits and meagre luggage; the scrum of cameramen snapping away at this strange and freshly-docked cargo; the calypsonian Lord Kitchener acceding to a Pathé newsman’s ...”

“... an English peasantry in The Origins of English Individualism showed. In that work his canvas was broad, covering five centuries, and both argument and evidence were deliberately diffuse. Now, continuing his campaign against those who would see Tudor and Stuart England as a great watershed, as the time of transition from one social and economic order to ...”

“... population. Nor were Africans the only newcomers. In the same decades, the liberal policies of William Penn made his colony a magnet for the recruitment of Germans and Scots-Irish, who typically disembarked at Philadelphia but then settled a broad arc of territory from central New York down through the Carolina ...”

“... would lay almost every novel open to piracy. From Russia, Glyn received an invitation from two broad-minded grand duchesses to write a novel about tsarist society. By that time a rumour had circulated worldwide that the Balkan queen of Three Weeks was based on the Tsarina, who (gossip said) because of her inability to produce an heir had been packed off on ...”

“... tongues. How great a diversity, Swift can hardly have imagined; it needed the researches of a William Jones or a Wilhelm von Humboldt to begin to persuade literary Europeans that they were not quite the masters of the speaking world. Now we know better – well, perhaps just a little. We know that something like four thousand languages are spoken in the ...”

“... Sir William Jones, the Enlightenment polymath who established the shared origins of Indo-European languages and cultures, certainly didn’t lack a capacity for big vision. But he was also keen on details, with no time for broad-brush talk about the seven ages of man. He was 47 – still in Jaques’s fifth age (‘And then the justice … with eyes severe’) – when he died in 1794, in the fancy Calcutta suburb of Garden Reach ...”

“... Soon afterwards, a John Buchan Society was founded at Edinburgh. In the early Eighties, my father William Buchan felt emboldened to publish a memoir of his father. Though a little defensive, it drew in the Victorian background and introduced a powerful sense of John Buchan’s strangeness and otherworldliness that had been missing from the ...”

“... stepped onto the world stage as an imperial power in the Spanish-American War of 1898, President William McKinley insisted that ours was a ‘benevolent’ imperialism, that the conquest of Puerto Rico and the Philippines ought not to be compared to the despotic actions of European powers. Woodrow Wilson insisted that only the US possessed the combination of ...”

“... to the scientific and philosophical contributions of the ‘Cambridge Network’ – men like William Whewell, Adam Sedgwick, Charles Babbage, George Airy, John Herschel and John Henslow. Some half-dozen pieces on the Cambridge Apostles, not the oldest but certainly the longest-lived of student secret societies, have made readers familiar with a whole ...”

“... to do now than it was for Clark and his authors, who, Roberts says, shared with their readers ‘a broad sense of the purpose and direction’ of the volumes in his History. I should think that their purpose, then as now, was to help undergraduates to write essays and pass exams. If the present History becomes superannuated before it is finished it is more ...”

“... Howe, for example, gave no sexual trouble to anyone we know about. Nor indeed did Diana Trilling. William Phillips and William Barrett seem to have been uxorious or monastic by contrast to the friends whose hands they held at moments of crisis. Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb are Philemon and Baucis, not Abelard and ...”

“... a blog for the Telegraph of a Treasury aide who’d said to him that ‘Alex Salmond wants to be William Wallace.’ ‘No,’ Martin corrected him. ‘Alex Salmond wants to be Robert the Bruce.’ Wallace has been cast as ‘the people’s champion’, a role he played in the 1975 novel The Wallace by the prolific Nigel Tranter and, twenty years later, in ...”

“... it’, as well they might. Such stories might seem far away from modern science, but according to William Eamon they hold vital clues to the course and meaning of the Scientific Revolution. The quick-witted medical improviser was Leonardo Fioravanti, an eminent ‘professor of secrets’, one of a number of Renaissance writers who traded on their reputation ...”