“... future. The military details will be familiar to many from school history lessons. Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, having overcome the doubts of some of his own commanders, marched south from Derby to confront the hastily mustered Hanoverian army under the direct command of George II. As in previous engagements, the numerical superiority of ...”

“... lamp would be burning, and we would talk about politics, Labour questions, Emerson, Ruskin, Edward Carpenter, right into the night.’ Nellie Gawthorpe was another who thrived in this atmosphere. Brought up in the working-class respectability of a red-brick terrace in north Leeds, she was transformed by the discussions held at her local Pupil ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Austen Chamberlain’s displacement as Conservative leader in 1922 came as a rude shock. It was said that he always played the game and always lost it; having lost, his recriminations were private; in public he continued to play the game, in due course receiving the Foreign Office as a consolation prize. Nor did his brother Neville relish being ousted as ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a servile national identity. Less a nation of shopkeepers than of butlers – the most that can be said of a true patriot in Ukania is that he is ‘a loyal servant of the Crown’. The ideal, it seems, is the Admirable Crichton. We even have a labour movement so denatured and corrupted by instinctive Ukanian authoritarianism that it takes a reactionary ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”