“... Hugh Ouston produces work on the institutional changes brought about during and immediately after James VII’s forced cool-off in Scotland in the early 1680s; others of the essays show a willingness to investigate aspects of Scottish society, both civil and ecclesiastical, before the Enlightenment. These voices have mostly not been heard before, and the book ...”

“... cognoscenti fled the parboiled American plains for the amenities of English civil life. Henry James dined out on transatlantic discrepancies until they nearly killed him and to this day there is still a kind of American for whom England is an America. But increasingly, these are the disoriented few. Something that never really was – money springs to ...”

“... for our faith’ in Granada and Morocco, had battled ‘at one time with the [Muslim] lord of Palatye/Against another heathen in Turkey’. If such far-flung mercenary careers hardly advanced the cause of peace, they did contribute to the sense of a universal chivalric ethos that united even enemy warriors, destabilising perceptions of a binary ...”

“... calculates that Burke spoke more than any other Parliamentarian between 1774 and 1776 except Lord North, the Prime Minister. It follows that some of the extreme ingenuity which has been expended on trying to reconstruct a coherent Burkeian line over time (in particular, efforts to reconcile the violence of his language against the French Revolution with ...”

“... at his (or her) partner or at some unspecified point outside the picture, as in the portrait of Lord Digby and Lord Russell – either way, the missed glances hint at boredom. Maybe the reason so many conversations in the movies take place on the front seats of cars is that it is one of the few situations in which a ...”

“... George and Mrs Fitzherbert went through a ceremony of marriage. George assured his friend, Charles James Fox, that he was not married, and Fox repeated the assurance to the House of Commons. Maria was furious when George told her what Fox had said; and Fox was similarly infuriated when, from somebody who had been present at the wedding, he found out that ...”

“... serving Prime Minister, and occupied the post for a longer continuous period than anyone since Lord Liverpool in the early 19th century. As a result, the volume of official paperwork impinging on her career is enormous, and much of it is still under wraps. The first and only woman to lead the Conservative Party, and the first non-royal female ever to lead ...”

“... It gave, uniquely, something like a global perspective. ‘Lingard never gets anything wrong,’ Lord Acton wrote. For Davies he is a solitary hero, his achievement ‘colossal’. Can the same be said of Davies? His book is at least colossally long, and shows signs of the short time its author proudly says it took him to write, from sources that are ...”

“... with sundials and statues, was set apart for the special pleasure of the most senior courtiers. Lord Burghley’s garden at Theobalds followed a similar model: it had a privy garden with a knot at its centre, while the expansive great garden (more than seven acres) contained nine divisions into knots. As the 16th century progressed, the ornaments within ...”

“... House’s ‘Special’ The Falkland Islands Dispute – International Dimensions Professor James Fawcett agrees on line 3 that ‘the determination of territorial title, when it is disputed, is a complex issue of fact and law,’ and asserts on line 31 that ‘the territorial title to the islands... must be accorded to the United Kingdom.’ On this ...”

“... that, his fears dispelled, he now shares our rejoicing in eternal life, the gift of that Risen Lord who here on earth he did not yet know.That’s one way to do it. In a valedictory poem published in the LRB (6 February 1986), Clive James made a similar point, though less unctuously:A bedside manner in your graveyard ...”

“... represented seemed ridiculous, ‘a bundle of inconsistent whims and affectations’ according to Lord Macaulay. No longer daring, merely trashy with a disturbing sense of something sexual and transgressive, Strawberry Hill embodied everything the Victorians despised about their Georgian grandparents. The contents, many of which are now in museums around the ...”

“... wives and a student or two (and one student’s mother), and trying to write a book on James Buchanan, the 15th President of the United States, a Pennsylvanian who sought at (almost) all costs to keep the South in the Union. But then Alf was doing these things before and (presumably) after the Ford years too; what happened only in the Ford ...”

“... it was 1981. It is difficult to react to Savage Grace without sounding like either Savonarola or Lord Longford. Some kind of moral judgment seems to be called for. No aesthetic judgment is possible anyhow, because this is one of those un-books composed of letters and statements by friends, acquaintances and witnesses. Presumably the statements were taped and ...”

“... rights. The tough guys of Chartism are here as well. From Manchester there is the twice imprisoned James Leach, whose Stubborn Facts from the Factories was milked by Engels for his Condition of the Working Class in England (Leach ended up in the 1850s as a soda-water manufacturer). Also from Manchester is the argumentative Reginald Jones Richardson, another ...”