“... peace with one another, and will not for a different faith or a change of churches shed blood. It took the rest of Europe a century and more to learn that lesson, and Anjou himself, as King Henri III of France, would be stabbed to death by a religious fanatic – as it happens, a Catholic. But it would have been misleading to have left the story in 1573 (let ...”

“... It was not a pilgrimage that took us to Bishop’s Stortford, but simply a search for lunch. Once in the little town, however, we were reminded of what we had known and then forgotten: that it was the birthplace of Cecil John Rhodes. Moreover, we were told that the house in which Rhodes was born had been turned into a museum ...”

“... the exhibition by Hermione Hobhouse, and a first-class biography by Robert Rhodes James.* Albert took a long time to receive his deserts. Indeed I doubt whether he was fully appreciated during his lifetime. He was a foreigner. He disliked the rigmarole of court life and he was altogether too clever. The Great Exhibition of 1851, housed in the Crystal ...”

“... sidewalk before slowing to a halt outside the green house at 83 Beals Street, the house where John Kennedy was born. The windows on the ground floor had curtains of Irish lace. ‘That dog has no right to be walking over there,’ said the lady. The young man smiled and snapped his fingers. ‘Dog got no sense of history,’ he said, then he ...”

“... of the Exchequer was inevitable: but the government decision against this project in 1968 took a surprisingly painful toll in disillusioned nuclear physicists. This long-drawn-out conflict not only pushed the science policy machine into a permanently defensive posture against Treasury economisers: it also demolished the notion of a united front for ...”

“... in San Francisco published a pamphlet taking issue with claims made by California’s governor, John Bigler, who had characterised the state’s 7520 Chinese migrants as servile ‘coolies’ undercutting white workers. ‘The poor Chinaman does not come here as a slave,’ Tong Achick and Chun Aching wrote in An Analysis of the Chinese Question. ‘He ...”

“... French literature, the 11th-century poem of ‘La Vie de Saint Alexis’ is the story of a man who took his first step on the road to sainthood by deserting his wife on their wedding-night. (In a properly frosty chapter on the Surrealist cult of Sade in the 1930s, Carolyn Dean comes within three italic characters of making the volume’s one joke, when she has ...”

“... of the Modern movement was beyond anybody’s control. The problems of how and why its suppression took place may or may not get analysed in a sequel. But at least it is left ...”

“... to complete what were expected to be the formalities. It was not Kitchener’s fault that these took another two years, as the Boers fell back very successfully on guerrilla tactics. But his method of combating these tactics, by a massive network of blockhouses dividing up the veldt into numbered squares, and the infamous system of ‘concentration ...”

“... respect for institutions and persons that have no right to respect.’ This determined disrespect took the form of explicit mockery of those who would censor him. ‘Look here, Low,’ says Beaverbrook in 1927, ‘your cartoons are giving great offence to my friends. I must ask you to reconsider your view of Lord Birkenhead, Mr Churchill and the ...”

“... Sartre, a superior being slumming in the ranks, he gives hints of their complicity in the role he took on their behalf. ‘Hey Sartre you’re a philosopher, do you think I should ...’ a soldier asks, as if the obsessively independent thinker had finally been allotted a pastoral responsibility in the barrack-room. But Sartre the philosophical clown is a ...”

“... appears to have pervaded Getty’s personal life. After a paternity suit had had to be settled, he took to requiring women he went to bed with to sign a release just before the event. Each divorce seemed to bring a meaner and more humiliating squabble over money. He tended to ignore the four sons produced by his marriages; when he did notice them, it was ...”

“... afford both to compete and to do its public duty. So it bought property, it built studios, it took on more and more staff, it flourished – and it grew. Soon it was the largest broadcasting organisation in the world. There was scarcely an aspect of television or radio production for which it did not itself accept responsbility. At one end of the process ...”

“... have occurred to him was to note for us the shape of a stain on his breeches or how his mistress took her skirt off to go to bed. Coleridge liked to jot such things down, and Coleridge, like a modern writer, must privately have thought that everything about him must be fascinating to any reader. The new mimesis is thus really a question of the writer ...”

“... lists in the library as Doctor Zhivago slowly crept up on Lolita. During that year Nabokov took every opportunity to make snide remarks about Pasternak’s Zhivago in the course of his lectures. Among Russian friends he compared the novel to the works of Charskaya, a novelist who had been popular with pre-revolutionary schoolgirls. The most jaundiced ...”