“... the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Donald Trump’s (then) chief of staff, John Kelly, went on Fox News and delivered a history lesson. ‘The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,’ he said. ‘Men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.’ Kelly’s ...”

“... of History’ is a case in point. Herbert Butterfield slew it in 1931, and here come John Pocock and Jonathan Clark to slay it again. There is next to nothing in common between them, save their opposition to the Whig Interpretation and its offspring: but it is that opposition which provides both of them with the structure of their argument and ...”

“... which didn’t quite fit. The story of attorney Cromwell’s mission to Rome was first told by John Foxe in Actes and Monumentes, the ‘Book of Martyrs’. Foxe had to rescue his hero with some deft literary footwork, turning on its head the uncomfortable tale of Cromwell’s journey to the heart of Roman superstition and error. Elizabethan Protestants ...”

“... peglegs: all press-ganged upstream with Adam Dalgleish’s impersonator, Roy Marsden, for the Long John Silver show at the Mermaid. James is left with a heritage trail of selective quotations, a London Dungeon of waxwork crimes exhibited in authentic locations. This is an empty set, a set defined by its architecture (where even Mandy the Temp, in her ...”

“... made legs seem stumbling and stumpy, shortness there’. The madness, too, of her father, John Guthrie, whose eyes slip ‘up and down her dress’ when Chris is harassed by a local ‘daftie’ and ‘peep out’, like those of ‘a caged beast’, when he sees her in her knickers; who sneaks round the door of her room at night, ‘a great cat ...”

“... the treatment meted out by the medical profession to the young shell-shock victim Septimus Warren Smith, Clarissa’s dark double: insanity to her sanity, death to her life. In the novel, the cold fury climaxes in a lengthy denunciation of the will-to-power manifest in the Harley Street specialist Sir William Bradshaw’s worship of the twin ...”

“... us, as for Trollope, ‘a terrible aspect’. It doesn’t apparently, though, for Gilbert Phelps, John Sutherland and Peter Keating, surveyors and encyclopedists of the form who in their respective fields have laboured with energetic exhaustiveness and not broken down. Each of these books feels as if it takes in an infinity of novels, and each deserves the ...”

“... Linnaeus’s remarkable botanical collection, which was purchased for £1000 by James Edward Smith in 1783 and brought to London over the protest of all Swedish science. By the beginning of the Victorian era, the amateur tradition of the country naturalist and nature-appreciator – a tradition given great dignity and prestige by Gilbert White – had ...”

“... The General Crisis of the 17th Century, published in 1978 and edited by Geoffrey Parker and Lesley Smith. Thanks particularly to the editors’ introduction and John Eddy’s essay on the effect of sunspots, the debate was pushed in a new direction: climate change and its impact on the food supply and demography now became a ...”

“... her ‘civilised reach’: she is an excellent pianist; she knows her Shakespeare, her Adam Smith and her John Stuart Mill. Like Henry Perowne in Saturday, she is enlightened and honourable: a quietly heroic technocrat who brings ‘reasonableness to hopeless situations’, a liberal-paternalist superego figure who ...”

“... given to jokes, even if his poems are often wry:As I sd to myfriend, because I amalways talking, John, Isd, which was not hisname, the darkness sur-rounds us, whatcan we do againstit or else, shall wewhy not, buy a goddamn big car,drive, he sd, forchrist’s sake, lookout where yr going.‘I Know a Man’ was included in Creeley’s first major ...”

“... his list of transgressive breachings, include the propulsion in 2005 of a human cannonball, David Smith Sr, from Tijuana, Mexico over the wall and into a safety net in San Diego, California, an open-air circus act that shot him maybe sixty metres. Smith’s stunt was not an immigration offence: he’d obtained permission ...”

“... to preoccupy many of the conspirators. Klemens von Klemperer, an émigré German historian from Smith College and the biographer of the Austrian Christian-Socialist prime minister of the Twenties Ignaz Seipel, was an adviser on Beller’s film as well as a participant at the Columbia discussion. Klemperer has always argued that the essential feature of the ...”

“... North’ and the man who hid from his creditors under Blackwood’s table. ‘North’ (John Wilson) had invited De Quincey to Edinburgh, in the hope that he would provide him with lectures for his Edinburgh Professorship of Moral Philosophy – a subject of which Wilson knew little and practised less. De Quincey lived in or near Edinburgh for over ...”

“... 1850s. According to the Egyptologist E.A. Wallis Budge, when the British Museum assistant George Smith first read the cuneiform in 1872, he ‘jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself’.The tablet was one of more than thirty thousand that formed the Royal Library ...”