“... that, along with the regretted scholastic exchanges, passionate love letters went up in smoke. It may simply have been more about those bears.This isn’t the only bonfire to have made Wade’s task more difficult. When the economic historian Eileen Power died in 1940, her sisters burned most of her personal papers. It is impossible to know whether this was a ...”

“... uses the phrase in a more nuanced way. His subtitle points to the fact that while Harold Godwinson may have been ‘the last English king’ (actually he was half-Danish), and possibly the ‘last of the Saxon kings’ (though that is just Bulwer-Lytton deflecting the shame of defeat away from England), unlike his predecessor, Edward the Confessor, he had no ...”

“... no more than rumour, like the one about Augustus and the figs. The most prolific court poisoner may have been the eunuch Bagoas, who is said to have killed two Persian kings before succumbing himself during a failed attempt on the life of Darius III (if you believe Diodorus of Sicily). During the long search for an elixir of life several Chinese emperors ...”

“... in its original scoring; the piano accompaniments for the others have a space and colour that may stem from their instrumental origins. ‘Orpheus with His Lute’, with words from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, opens the cycle with rising E major semi-quavers, and moments of harmonic shock, with voice and piano sometimes just a tone apart. ‘Under the ...”

“... was as precious as that of any Englishman, and so the law demanded justice for his death. Gouge may not have known it, or felt it as protection, but living under Dandy’s roof his inalienable self was shielded by the sovereignty of England, which encompassed its colonies. Those servants who were not beaten to death, or held in a state of abject ...”

“... magic and science, we would do better to view them as parallel, as two modes of knowledge.’ They may not be equals in respect of the results they yield, but they are linked by ‘the kind of mental operations on which the two draw’. That said, the practical results of first science are not to be sniffed at. The ‘great arts of civilisation’ mastered in ...”

“... is simple: the more one writes, the better chance one has of producing something worthwhile. ‘It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones,’ she told the Paris Review in 1978. You should try, of course, to make every novel as good as it can be – but you have to be prepared to fail.Failure is never far away ...”

“... you waving glow sticks. Harry will allow no contradiction and no variance – ‘Recollections may vary,’ the late queen said – and only when his wider family shows that it ‘deeply appreciates’ the truth of what he’s gone through will ‘reconciliation’ be possible. Harry says, in his Montecito meets TikTok kind of way, that ‘forgiveness is ...”

“... on board the Bahraini-flagged MV Aman, at anchor in the Gulf of Suez. Aisha had been hired in May 2017 as the Aman’s first mate. The ship was owned by a Bahraini company called Tylos Shipping and Marine Services, and operated by a crew of sixteen men from Egypt, India and Syria. According to an ITF report, the Aman was arrested in November 2017 (under ...”

“... elevate their subject from the parochial to the universal. In practice, the vast majority of them may only study one French region, one provincial town, or even one Parisian arrondissement, but armed with a mixture of grand theory, methodological ingenuity and chutzpah, they often address their conclusions to a far broader humanity. And this is an enviable ...”

“... injustice to the unprotected.’ The fact that he is not also molested in the introduction may be a gratifying mark of the respect still shown towards the episcopate by Conservatives in Oxford. But both Plant and Sykes seem to have walked unwarily into the common room of All Souls from another sort of conclave or conventicle in which they would have ...”

“... in this collection of essays and reports, he takes a rather different line about how events may move. Paradoxically, this is because the ‘Czechoslovakia under Ice’ article is among the earliest items in the book. In 1984, the events of Poland in 1980-81 were closer to mind, with their lesson of how a heavily-armed Communist state structure could be ...”

“... that the student protest consciously played over anniversaries: the death of Zhou Enlai, the May Fourth Movement, the rift with Russia, liberation. Moreover, a geomantic line bisects Beijing, running north to south through the heart of the Forbidden City, Tiananmen, the Monument to the People’s Heroes, and Mao’s body in the mausoleum. It is sacred ...”

“... do is introduce an occasional ‘joke’ (a subversive dog) into a conversation piece, which ‘may have provided a source of positive reassurance to a culture that had still entirely to resolve its deeply conflicting feelings about the morality (or lack thereof) of luxurious behaviour’. Hogarth’s parody, a drunken revel called A Midnight Modern ...”

“... man’s Providentially-assisted recovery of pre-lapsarian wisdom, has led us to expect). It may therefore be preferable to regard the idea as a final prophetic warning to modern man, a plea for the preservation of religious authority against the corrosive effects of scepticism. Lilla has written a substantial and scholarly book, even if he ...”