“... bankruptcy in Northumberland. There were the justifiable grievances among the Episcopalians in north-east Scotland, and the more general and equally justified sense of national outrage in Scotland as a whole produced by the shabby backtracking on the explicit and implicit promises of the Union bargain by post-Union Parliaments. Altogether in 1715 there was ...”

“... were the ship’s captain, David Cheap; his second-in-command, Robert Baynes; the chief gunner, John Bulkeley; the carpenter, John Cummins; and three young midshipmen, John Byron, Alexander Campbell and Isaac Morris. They returned home in rival groups, by different routes, telling ...”

“... as blunt, uncourtly and dressed always in black, Walsingham has long defied categorisation. John Cooper’s book is a fresh attempt to assess the accuracy of these opposing images. It charts Walsingham’s life from his birth in 1531 or 1532, on the cusp of the Henrician Reformation and the break with Rome, through his education at King’s ...”

“... a former Nato commander; and General Charles A. Horner, the former commander-in-chief of the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Unfortunately, Schell did not interview the man whose presence within this movement might most astonish those who have not been following recent developments: Ambassador Paul Nitze, the most durable of Cold War hawks, who ...”

“... befriending and then covering up on behalf of the Democratic politician and presidential hopeful John Edwards takes the genre of enabler’s revenge to a whole new level. ‘Covering up’ doesn’t really do justice to Young’s role, which by the end included going on the run with Edwards’s mistress Rielle Hunter and their love-child (with Young’s own ...”

“... and a fragile, insecure State combined to produce a sort of dark ages. It was as though Ireland north and south vied with each other over who could produce the most sectarian state. Censorship, mass emigration, economic stagnation. For several chapters this book deals not with the Church but with the State, because the Church was the State. It has always ...”

“... lately engaged in the destruction of the Stalingrad cauldron against the German forces further north. As a result, the drive on Rostov failed, though only just, and Manstein, the greatest of the German commanders, was able to outmanoeuvre and defeat the Soviet offensive. Now came one of the crucial decisions of the war. In February 1943 Manstein, who had ...”

“... The​ village of Capel Celyn was drowned in 1965 when the valley of Tryweryn, in north-west Wales, was flooded to create a reservoir to serve the (English) city of Liverpool. No Welsh MP supported the bill that enabled the reservoir to be built. Seventy people had to leave their homes. The words ‘Cofiwch Dryweryn’ (‘Remember Tryweryn’), written on the wall of a ruined cottage near Aberystwyth, subsequently became a slogan for Welsh nationalism, and the flooding of the valley precipitated the election of the nationalist Plaid Cymru’s first MP, Gwynfor Evans, in 1966 ...”

“... and with it the promise of widespread prosperity. This dogma held sway even at the University of North Carolina, a centre of Southern liberalism, where Woodward earned his doctorate. In 1935, he wrote to a friend that he had ‘not gleaned a single scholarly idea from any professor’. Things changed later that year, however, with the arrival of Howard ...”

“... the meaning of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that shocked John Lennon and George Harrison at the dawn of Swinging London. When I interviewed one of the Six Gallery poets, Michael McClure, in 2011, he recalled earlier episodes of Dionysian frenzy with Gerd Stern and a thrash of ‘belly dancers and bongo drums’. Nights ...”

“... that English literature had already been taking up the swelling theme of empire – a new book by John McVeagh has much to say about this. ‘How can one write the history of the English-speaking peoples and their empires?’ – a large question on which Calder must have long deliberated before striking out his path. There has been discussion lately as to ...”

“... pleasant opportunity to tell people twice their age what to do. At the time when the undergraduate John Henry Newman was delighting in the inexhaustible metaphorical riches of Aeschylus at Oxford, the students of Maynooth were being fed a philistine diet of papist apologetics and garbled chunks of scholasticism. It was well nigh impossible, given this dismal ...”

“... The dust jacket of the final volume of Bevis Hillier’s epic life of John Betjeman shows the poet laureate seized by giggles. In this lengthy coda to Hillier’s authorised biography Betjeman appears in many lights, but he’s rarely carefree. ‘Nothing frightens me more than the thought of dying,’ he told a friend in 1958 ...”

“... who was then 52 and lived in Collioure on the French part of the Mediterranean coast, just north of the border with Catalonia. He had published three gloomily introspective novels for adults, one of which had been praised by Delmore Schwartz, and he was an elegant, speedy translator, most recently of Simone de Beauvoir. Further information was in short ...”

“... to practise my newly acquired skill. My parents were both readers and Dad took the periodical John Bull, the books they generally favoured literature of escape, tales of ordinary folk like themselves who had thrown it all up for a life of mild adventure, a smallholding on the Wolds, say, or an island sanctuary, with both of them fans of the naturalist ...”