“... as births and the party ‘gossipings’ which followed births and churchings – though in 1633 Thomas Salmon of Great Tew dressed up as a woman so that he could join the female fun after a delivery. Advice for mothers and midwives, and the offences and disputes which arose over births, can, however, open even the door of the birthroom to curious ...”

“... out who Hanabeke is. This is good prose which should be read aloud slowly on the radio (as Dylan Thomas used to read Davies’s Autobiography of a Super-Tramp). Two new English comedies seem wan and sad after these four exuberant, exotic plants. The author of Train to Hell is an Alternative Comedian: that means, the sort that doesn’t make you laugh. He ...”

“... next day, when the Panzer advance cut the British line of communications, Gort’s chief of staff, Henry Pownall, telephoned the War Office to suggest that the preliminary preparations be made in case it proved necessary to evacuate the BEF. Churchill and Ironside were reluctant to accept this course and continued to order Gort to break out southward until the ...”

“... Air.’The guilty men, apart from the forgers themselves, are the press barons and their editors: Henry Nannen, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Giles and Charles Douglas-Home. That Trevor-Roper should have ‘taken the bona fides of the editor’ – of Stern – ‘as a datum’ passes belief. Probably he has never read the magazine. However, journalists, excluding ...”

“... although she used to talk in later life about what a strange lottery marriage was. What was Thomas Carlyle’s figure of romance? One thing that can be said for the Romantic poets is that they were not snobs: their images of love were of violets by mossy stones rather than grand society hostesses. Carlyle looks forward to the style of romance familiar ...”

“... In March 1932​ , Thomas Mann visited Weimar in central Germany. For the last thirty years of the 18th century, this modestly sized town was home to Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Wieland, but by the 1930s it had become a hotbed of the radical right. ‘The admixture of Hitlerism and Goethe affects one strangely,’ Mann wrote in ‘Meine Goethereise ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Mann’s affidavit, which stated that he was on his way to Princeton to meet up with his father Thomas, and said he was ‘honoured to make the acquaintance of the son of so great a man’. Varian Fry was a stiff, rather priggish man, a spoilt only child who manipulated his parents with fake illnesses, was bullied at school and became known as a prankster ...”

“... civilising influence to William’s court’ rests on nothing much: pseudo-Ingulf again, and Thomas Rudborne writing centuries later. She may have persuaded William to allow a decent burial in 1075 for Queen Edith, Harold’s sister and Edward’s wife, but William was always careful about King Edward’s reputation, it being a vital part of his claim to ...”

“... woman is a frail thing and of weak discretion.’ ‘I like not a female Poetess at any hand,’ Thomas Powell writes in 1631. Rousseau in 1762 insists that ‘the entire education of women must be relative to men.’ And so on and so on and so on. Doesn’t even Chekhov’s treatment of the bookish wife niggle, in ‘Lady with Lapdog’? Why does he have to ...”

“... and gives the novel a starred review, praising its ‘charming’ recombination of the styles of Thomas Pynchon and Boris Vian and its ‘tender’, ‘childlike’ depiction of heterosexual love. Jack figures the Kirkus reviewer must be a woman, probably studying French, unduly influenced by Will’s touched-up author photo. Then comes a review in the New ...”

“... the American Legislative Exchange Council. The group is of Cold War vintage, founded in 1973 by Henry Hyde, Lou Barnett and Paul Weyrich, a Wisconsin native. (Weyrich also had a hand in starting the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority.) By defining itself as a non-partisan, non-profit organisation, Alec eludes legal definitions of lobbying while ...”

“... Sea during the debates that immediately preceded the British-Irish Union. The Scottish politician Henry Dundas, an admirer of Smith and the prime mover behind the union, advanced an anti-feudalist rationale for British-Irish integration; and there were also echoes of Smith among Irish unionists, with Thomas Brook Clarke ...”

“... rhetoric of patriots than those of the early 18th-century British journalists John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon or the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel. After 1776, in any case, Locke’s influence as a political philosopher declined sharply. By the 1780s Americans of the founding generation were much more likely to invoke the ideas of Montesquieu or William ...”

“... a few bombers were guillotined, others responded with further attacks. On 12 February 1894, Émile Henry, a 21-year-old friend of Fénéon, planted an explosive in Café Terminus at Gare Saint-Lazare, killing one person and injuring twenty. On 4 April another bomb tore up the Restaurant Foyot across from the Senate, and this time Fénéon was a suspect. After ...”