“... Edward Thompson’s Customs in Common is described as a ‘companion volume’ to his The Making of the English Working Class, and rises to the occasion. It has the wide range of reference, the densely-textured documentation, a special quality of charged impressionism (sometimes tendentious, more often honourably concerned with generous perspectives and panoramic insight), the embattled moral fervour, which established the earlier book as a classic of historical scholarship and indeed of English letters ...”

“... What were you like as a child?’ Dick Cavett asked Edward Gorey on his talk show in November 1977. ‘Small,’ he replied. Gorey, who died in 2000 at the age of 75, did not like to talk about himself or his work, which depended, like the Japanese literature he admired, ‘very much [on] what is left out’. Someone who thought of himself principally as a writer, but is now remembered chiefly as an artist and illustrator of his own and other people’s work, Gorey created a peculiar, hermetic world in which the comic and the macabre combine in proportions dependent on the reader’s temperament ...”

“... Burckhardt, William Thomson (known as Osman effendi), John Gardner Wilkinson, Robert Hay and Edward Lane also ‘went native’ on their travels. Like Champollion, they aped the robes and turbans of the Ottoman ruling class, browned their skin, and made a show of living in ‘Oriental’ style. Hay, Burton and Gardner Wilkinson took their sex lives ...”

“... ambitions in the 19th century is to focus on the role of technology. This is the approach taken by Edward Gillin, a historian of science, in his entertaining overview. The Crimean crisis can itself be seen as an attempt by these two technologically superior countries to intimidate the Ottomans into accepting their political guidance in return for military ...”

“... Ireland remains part of the Single Market even though the rest of the UK has left. Paisley said Gove had claimed he was a unionist. ‘Indeed he even boasted once in my local paper that he could sing “The Sash”.’‘The Sash’ is the ballad sung by members of the Orange Order as they march around Northern Ireland celebrating battles won ‘in ...”

“... of Meyerhold, Stanislavsky and Granovsky have been published in the West (notably the works by Edward Braun and Béatrice Picon-Vallin): but nothing on quite this scale has appeared for many years – perhaps not since Joseph Gregor and the historian René Fülöp-Miller produced their Das Russische Theater in Vienna in 1928. The subject is still ...”

“... the draughty hall. ‘I tell you,’tis incredible to believe.’ Even the RSC directors, it’s said, voted ‘Shall I die?’ unauthorial at a meeting to plan their season. Some might think that no test, given the company’s recent showing with Shakespeare, but Nunn, Hands and the rest of the team would swop even Nickleby for a new work by the Bard. Every ...”

“... rhetoric. They follow well-established conventions governing what should and should not be said. They speak to enduring American myths and images, and they employ standard rhetorical devices in bridging and balancing opposite values and appeals. Their quality is largely determined by the symbolic nature of the Presidential election. Presidential ...”

“... Galway fled to South America? What are his views really about abortion? Didn’t he wince when I said Noel Browne’s fearless autobiography Against the tide reduced me to helpless tears? For Browne fought the Hierarchy and lost. So should we really start talking about Church and State or should we just agree that it’s great to be back in this wonderful ...”

“... public servants and contractors. The authors, both outstanding journalists, might also have said that this helps to account for the abject quality of mass political journalism: if the real facts of power and of its use are concealed, it is hardly surprising that the media should resort to the speculative trash which passes for political analysis. Once ...”

“... first-born daughter, had acceded to the throne following the death of Henry’s teenage son, Edward VI. As fervently Catholic as Edward had been Protestant, Mary was determined to restore papal supremacy in England. She was the product of an Anglo-Spanish marriage: her mother was Henry VIII’s first, divorced ...”

“... challenged by his insolent teenage slave, handed him over ‘to be broken’ by an overseer called Edward Covey. ‘Mr Covey succeeded in breaking me,’ Douglass wrote, ‘in body, soul and spirit.’ He was reduced to a beastlike stupor – but then one day he fought back, unnerving Covey, who didn’t want to admit that the 16-year-old still had the ...”

“... she knows no more than anybody else and can only ask a string of questions. Eddy, first-born of Edward and Alexandra, the ‘dawdly’ flaccid prince with the long simian arms and the prominent collar and cuffs, armed with the potentially damning knowledge of how to disembowel deer, must be acquitted of the Ripper charge for lack of evidence. What else is ...”

“... shtarker (Yiddish: strong man, strong arm) – gangster; hard man Yiddish, it turns out, has not said its last word: it is still involved in the business of coinages and slippages. Live Yiddish is the happy invention of this novel. And it is an invention that necessitates, and is caused by, an outlandish back story: an atom bomb fell on Berlin in 1946; the ...”

“... victory salutes were traded in for some fireside modesty. ‘In the years to come,’ he said once, ‘people may decide that we went about things in the worst possible way, that we got it all wrong. We’ll just have to see.’ But with Walesa there was always the likelihood of a flip retort, a quick get-out for a man who had spent his life trying ...”