“... Blackbourn’s main contribution was to demolish the argument that after failing to acquire power in 1848-49, the German bourgeoisie absorbed ‘aristocratic’ values that prioritised hierarchy and authority over the liberalism and openness supposedly prevalent in other parts of Europe, notably Britain and France. In fact there was plenty of evidence ...”

“... When Major Henry committed suicide, Proust wrote that the Dreyfus Affair, hitherto pure Balzac, had become Shakespearean. While the Iraq affair obviously differs from Dreyfus, we can see what Proust meant. Yet the Iraq crisis had been unfolding before Dr David Kelly’s death – whatever Lord Justice Hutton’s inquiry concludes – and the sense that Iraq did not cause but nevertheless represents a crisis of the Labour Party has been with us for months now ...”

“... that Evelyn Waugh was the greatest English novelist of his generation. Certainly Graham Greene, Henry Green and Angus Wilson thought so, although they and not he won the worldly honours Waugh would dearly have loved. On the other hand, that redoubtable holder of the Order of Merit, J.B. Priestley, did not think so. But then whom would he have ...”

“... Council. The council’s authority shouldn’t be exaggerated. The Privy Council exercised real power, but the power depended on royal prerogative. The king appointed and dismissed these officers at will, was under no legal obligation to seek the council’s advice or to follow it, and the council itself had no powers ...”

“... proportionally higher turnout by older white voters – have allowed Republicans to consolidate power at the state level, and achieve a ‘trifecta’: since 2010, after an infusion of money from the Koch brothers, Wisconsin has been one of 23 states where Republicans control the governor’s office and both branches of the legislature. The year 2010 ...”

“... the result of poison, of a champion roper, William Stepson; the shooting of Hale’s Osage friend Henry Roan; and the dramatic bombing of the house of one of the crimes’ investigators, Bill Smith, killing him, his Osage wife, Rita, and their white servant, Nettie. It wasn’t long before Mollie Burkhart began to suspect that her own health ...”

“... interwoven with those of the Continent ... Throughout the Middle Ages England was a Continental power; during much of that time, our laws were written in French. Over half of Shakespeare’s plays are set on the Continent. Donizetti and Verdi certainly regarded English literature as part of their own heritage ... Our architecture is obviously part of ...”

“... its provenance from the Established Church to cover the governing classes in general. What Henry Fairlie did two years later in a famous article in the Spectator was to gloss the term as identifying a particular sort of informal power network, which included not only the Prime Minister, of course, but also ‘such ...”

“... or nothing at all? ‘Love I laugh to scorn,’ says one of Emily’s poems, and the ‘strange power’ longed for in another is the power of, and for, annihilation. Neither God nor love is in question, but food, or the absence of it, is: a substance both obsessive and despised. Heathcliff is the tyrant of the ...”

“... time has come.’ If it were true, as we are incessantly told, that the monarchy has ‘no real power’ but a strong sense of constitutional probity, then one might expect to find some evidence that the King-in-waiting was warned to be circumspect. But there’s not a hint, in all of Ziegler’s industrious fossickings, of any concern on that score. There ...”

“... events did not accord with the expectations contained in the text that the chief negotiators Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho had signed in Paris. Yet the ‘war for peace’ did not in fact end in failure, if only because peace was never the objective. None of the protagonists actually sought peace, at least not in the commonly accepted sense of the ...”

“... The worst of them by far is J.G. Muddiman, a passionate monarchist (and a descendant of Henry Muddiman, known to Pepys as ‘an arch-rogue’, first an apologist for the Rump Parliament and then one of the Restoration’s principal political witchhunters) who edited the trial of Charles I for the Notable British Trials series and whose treatment of ...”

“... Albans not only through my own senses but through the apprehension of the people trying to secure power over the country.As preparation I read the last entry Dominic Cummings posted on his blog, from June 2019, just before he became Boris Johnson’s senior adviser – his main job, we assume, to win the next election for his boss’s new, Faragist ...”

“... Jacobean England had its own royal catastrophe when, in 1612, the heir to the throne, Prince Henry, died of typhoid at the age of 18. It even had its lost princess when, in the next year, his sister Elizabeth, afterwards known as the Queen of Hearts, married Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, and disappeared into a long and fairly inglorious future ...”

“... ideas were emerging as English Perpendicular, the fine-boned local expression of Gothic. Henry VII’s long-lost palaces stood at Richmond and Greenwich, and at Burbage in Wiltshire, John Seymour was starting work on his expensive new house, Wolfhall. Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, like the musical Six and innumerable historical novels and films before ...”