“... celebrate a civil partnership in the Palace of Westminster, and his latest book tells the story of James Pratt and John Smith, the last men to be executed for sodomy in Britain. Pratt was a servant and Smith a labourer; both were out of work when they were arrested, and only Pratt knew how to write. Pratt was 32 and Smith forty. Pratt was married with a ...”

“... compiling lists, but the lists themselves are interesting. For example: Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, James Wong Howe, Dudley Nichols, Clifford Odets, Robert Rossen, John Garfield, Charlie Chaplin and Leo McCarey all attended a reception in July 1943 for the Soviet director and administrator Mikhail Kalatozov. At that time Russian and American propaganda methods ...”

“... the next terrorist stabs you, he already knows that Yishai Menuhin, a planted agent belonging to Holland, will make sure to protect him from a Shin Bet interrogation. The terrorist also knows that Avner Gvaryahu, a planted agent belonging to Germany, will call the soldier who tries to prevent the attack a ‘war criminal’. He also knows that Sigi ...”

“... radicalism of the English sects was not parallelled by anything produced in no less sectarian Holland or Transylvania. But this leaves unaddressed the question of what that possibly mythical being a ‘European’ – or more realistically an Italian, Dutch or Polish historian – is to make of these strange and terrible transactions and the modes of ...”

“... New York society. The Schermerhorns belonged to the blue blood of America, having arrived from Holland in the 17th century. For Caroline (Mrs William Backhouse Astor Jr) the function of society was to keep other people out. She worked hand in glove with a deplorable-sounding gentleman called Ward McAllister who set himself up as a quasi-professional social ...”

“... a walk along the local beach or by taking minor trips or otherwise agreeable spells abroad: Henry James in France, D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico, Lawrence Durrell in Corfu, Michel Butor in Istanbul, Henry Miller in Greece. In December 1933, leaving his father in Simla and his mother in London, Patrick Leigh Fermor set off to walk from the Hook of ...”

“... the boundary between flesh and cloth was indeterminate. According to the Book of Job, in the King James version, we are clothed in skin and flesh; but one might equally describe early modern men and women as fleshed in clothes. ‘To be laid out upon a petticoat’ meant to have sex. When Queen Elizabeth imagined the ultimate destitution she said she might be ...”

“... Second World War. They were the first two characters established by the creators of the show, Tony Holland and Julia Smith (Ethel was based on a woman Holland met in a pub in Hackney). On Boxing Day 1988, seven million people watched ‘Civvy Street’, a prequel to the show that provides a backstory for all the main ...”

“... and respected. He was fair-minded and decent. Through him, I got to know another seminarian called James Doyle. He would stop and talk if we met in the corridor, even though fraternisation between seminarians and lay students was frowned on. He had many opinions and enjoyed gossip and had a habit of winding me up so I could never quite tell whether he was ...”

“... By the mid-l780s Knight moved in the liberal, not to say liberated Whig circles that had Charles James Fox as a hero, and ancient Athens as an inspiration. Knight’s first literary attempt was to describe a tour of Sicily in 1777. He hired two artists to accompany him, and briefed them to make meticulous drawings of the archaeological sites. His commentary ...”

“... foreign office as a place staffed by clerks who could write a good hand, but twenty years earlier, James Mill, Examiner of Correspondence at India House, was already like the permanent head of a 20th-century foreign office. He invented policy over a broad range, and when officials went out to knock India into a modern shape, it was ...”

“... matter of the density of detail the book manages to accumulate, detail like the concrete gulley in Holland Park Underground station ‘where a whole family of nervous, sooty little mice shot back and forth as if themselves operated by electricity’. Will’s architectural enthusiasms provide a starting-point for his distinctive but absolutely compelling ...”

“... Soil is naturally very wet and fenny.” Ha! said he, the same may be said of a **** as well as of Holland; this Whim having once entered his Noddle, he resolved to pursue the Hint, and try how far he could run the Parallel.’ This versatile hack was the otherwise unknown Thomas Stretzer, whose signature survives on manuscript receipts acknowledging that ...”

“... up. Tom Moore sang for his supper until there was nothing left of him, but it was not the fault of Holland House, which could be walked away from, as Byron proved. There is a crushing sort of determinism which tries to make social élites responsible for the corruption of artists. In fact, it is up to the artist. In our own time, T. S. Eliot received a lot of ...”

“... have been right.’ Russell will compare Ship Money to the Poll Tax, and describe the arrival of James I in London as a foretaste of the Single European Act. Such are the playful flourishes of a scholarly ascendancy. In these pages Blair Worden has even ventured the view (LRB, 29 August 1991) that Russell’s ‘hegemony’ over Civil War studies has ...”