“... was less of a parliamentary monarchy under Victor Emanuel than there had been under Charles Albert’; and he goes on to delight the reader with eyewitness accounts of the King’s boorishness and of his ‘strong predilection for blackguards of the spy genus’, as the British Ambassador wrote in one dispatch. Another dispatch recorded that ...”

“... Nor do the members of his own coterie fare much better. He is ‘wholly unsympathetic’ to Charles Williams’s mind, and although he has many warm and generous things to say about C.S. Lewis there comes a point at which he judges that ‘his ponderous silliness is becoming a fixed manner.’ Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer is a ‘distressing ...”

“... Discoveries, Lately Made by Sir John Herschel, L.L.D., F.R.S., &c, at the Cape of Good Hope’. Herschel – former president of the Royal Astronomical Society and son of William Herschel, the discoverer of Uranus – had sailed from Britain to South Africa two years before with a giant reflecting telescope, on a mission to map the southern skies ...”

“... he considered the greatest. When he visited Shanghai in 1933, one local newspaper expressed the hope that Japanese military activity in Manchuria would be suspended because of his visit. If his influence gradually waned, it is partly because he was so typical of his age that when it passed away, his reputation diminished along with it. His political ...”

“... tradition. ‘As long as you think you’re white,’ James Baldwin once said, ‘there’s no hope for you.’Attempts to dismantle racism have often subverted its vocabulary, turning epithets into appellations of pride. But anti-racist intellectuals have also been alert to the risk of nativism, of falling deeper into the clutches of race. In a debate ...”

“... round the houses. It may be that The Nature of the Book is most rewardingly approached not in the hope of finding a coherent thesis in it but as a miscellany of essays, or perhaps as an attempt to write too many interesting books at once. Johns’s starting-point is indignation. He is provoked by the only thorough survey of the impact of printing to have been ...”

“... in low humour, and could not distinguish true satire from scurrility; and the other, in the hope of having some post given him by those whom he had abused, in order to silence his dramatic talent.’ But it is Fielding’s author as advocate, not Savage’s author as Iscariot, that underlies King’s view of Haywood. She’s never quite able to catch a ...”

“... among the poor, in his own words, ‘as a man longs for his wedding day’. Beatrice Potter and Charles Booth figure, but more as urban explorers and dabblers in cross-class masquerade than as sociological researchers. Toynbee Hall’s ubiquitous Samuel and Henrietta Barnett show up, but their sexually conflicted acolyte, C.R. Ashbee, quickly elbows them ...”

“... at the Caroline Court. This was John Churchill, toy boy of the Duchess of Cleveland, one of Charles II’s discarded mistresses. Churchill, too, was treading a familiar trail: his elder sister was the Duke of York’s concubine. They married secretly, against the wishes of both families, and enjoyed a lifetime of connubial happiness, sustained by ...”

“... my interpretation is right, the appearing of the Lord cannot overpass the year 1881.’ The hope that he might be among the chosen, that he need never taste death, was to remain with him for the rest of his life. Still traumatised by his experiences in Alabama, he was immediately attracted by the radical egalitarianism of the Hackney Brethren. He broke ...”

“... being ruled by the Mamluk sultan and his officers. Bartolomeu Diaz had rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, and in the decades that followed the Portuguese threatened Muslim control of the Red Sea and sought to blockade Egypt’s spice trade. But Leo never mentions this, any more than he mentions the absence of printed books in Africa, or the impact of ...”

“... intolerable, unstoppable and, in war at least, indispensable. He was bred to it. His father, Sir Charles Jackson, was a Monmouthshire architect-developer, lawyer and politician who, among other things, built up a large collection of silver which virtually is the National Museum of Wales’s collection and bought shares in a then obscure Sunday newspaper ...”

“... of individual sportsmen too. Sport seems to license people to behave badly in a way they could not hope to get away with in normal life.Horspool takes us through the weird variety of sports practised by the British, from the medieval tournament and the Turf to golf and the Empire Games, scoring all round the wicket with the grace and economy of a Hammond or a ...”

“... her biographer, Mrs Gaskell (shocking irresponsibility about proven facts in both cases), while Charles Reade was given a particularly severe wigging for his novel It Is Never Too Late to Mend. This tale was, admittedly, based on an actual legal case, but not closely enough for Fitzjames’s taste. ‘We have taken the trouble of comparing this novel ...”

“... Morning Post, after a Private Eye of the time. She took as her second husband the rogue politician Charles Townshend, who seems to have married her for money and influence, and to have gone in fear of her female will. According to J. Steven Watson’s Preface – one of two excellent introductory pieces, the other being by the editor of the volume ...”