“... crows. Even their debunking of the myth that ravens have been kept in the Tower since the time of Charles II concludes: ‘The power of ravens to make people believe the impossible and survive difficult times is obvious.’ Like many popular science books in recent years, this one claims its subject as the world-changing event, phenomenon or invention. Crows ...”

“... to wangle him a postgraduate fellowship to Cambridge, where, in 1937, Berryman carried off the Charles Oldham Shakespeare Scholarship, a victory in which both he and Van Doren took enormous pride. At this stage of his career, Berryman’s always sizable hunger for acclaim was directed mainly towards academia. He was already writing the poems which would ...”

“... As a result ‘going postal’ came to be used as a synonym for a berserk outburst of violence. Charles Bukowski’s butch, squalid autobiographical novel Post Office (1971) gives some idea of how this might have come about: ‘It was 12 hours a night, plus supervisors, plus clerks, plus the fact that you could hardly breathe in that pack of flesh, plus ...”

“... animal, whatever it was, possessed extraordinary, supernatural powers. The famous wolf-hunter Jean-Charles d’Enneval, who succeeded Duhamel, antagonised the local worthies even more, by treating them as half-wits and failing to kill a single wolf in three months in a region where wolves seemed to outnumber human beings. By now, the nation was a laughing ...”

“... had very bbbad luck with your weather, Mr Piper.’ Apocryphal or not, the remark stuck. Trust the king to get it wrong: Mr Piper couldn’t have had better weather; he had made it so. His stormclouds over the Round Tower are as darkly fatty as British Restaurant oxtail soup. A touch of excess came naturally to him; he warmed to the worn pinnacle and the ...”

“... a scent of seawater. The theory of evolution is ascribed to Alfred Russel Wallace rather than to Charles Darwin, and it is ‘Shrösteinberg’s [rather than Shrödinger’s] anxiously anticipant cat’ which waits to discover if it is alive or dead within its box. We gradually realise that the main source of these errors, or differences between our universe ...”

“... of the sanguinary career of Tamerlane for the Time-Life History of the World. After my editor, Charles Boyle, had read the first draft, he went home and dreamed a strange dream in which ‘Old Hoppity’ turned up at Time-Life’s London offices. The dream, in time, metamorphosed into a poem, which he included in his collection The Very Man (1993). It ...”

“... ideas, patterns of consumerism, trade networks, secular culture, war efforts, as well as a king, with the people across the Atlantic. Consequently, Colonial American historians have long taken it for granted (as British historians rarely have) that their studies should have an Atlanticist scope, embracing aspects of Britain’s past as well as their ...”

“... him from centres of prestige and power. Dazzlingly precocious, he was designing furniture for the king in Windsor Castle at the age of 15. Towards the end of his short life (he died in 1852, at the age of 40), he was almost single-handedly responsible for the decoration and furnishing of the Palace of Westminster, impressing his personality on the heart of ...”

“... an hour or less for City workers, not to mention Essex men and girls. After monarchs, ranging from King John, whose hunting lodge was at Writtle, to Henry VIII, who built New Hall at Boreham (still standing), came Elizabethan lord chancellors (one is buried at Saffron Walden, another at Felsted) and Georgian lord mayors and City luminaries (too many to ...”

“... but it gave him enough free time to make trips from New York to Yale, where he made contact with Charles M. Andrews, the leading light in the school of historians that saw the American Revolution as a problem of British imperial governance. At the heart of Namier’s historical project was a geopolitical problem: the loss of the American colonies as seen ...”

“... was to make lists of celebrities unhappily transfixed in this way by the force of circumstance. Charles Féré, for example, wrote in 1892, citing B.A. Morel: ‘Who has not heard,’ says Morel, ‘of the febrile fits which were produced in the savant Erasmus at the sight of a plate of lentils? . . . King James II ...”

“... methodology. This was among the criticisms made of The Bell Curve (1994), Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s analysis of the correlations between IQ test data and race, unemployment, poor parenting and crime in the US. More recently, the historian of science Jessica Riskin and biologist Marcus Feldman excoriated Kathryn Paige Harden’s The Genetic ...”

“... series of eye-problems, partly the effects of undiagnosed porphyria, which eventually left the king blind. He was fascinated by the stage, and in the 1780s became drama critic for the Morning Post. He cultivated the friendship of actors, dramatists, theatre managers, with extraordinary assiduity; indeed, over a period of more than forty years he seems to ...”

“... the Thatcher government like Douglas Hurd and William Waldegrave as well as her private secretary Charles Powell, and the late Yehudi Avner, who was Israel’s ambassador in London between 1983 and 1988. When she became prime minister a number of pressing questions faced Thatcher at home and abroad: the economy, the unions, Ulster, Rhodesia, the Cold War in ...”