“... separate cities. ‘Sir Derby’? Nah. Ever heard Shakespeare talk of ‘Sir Falstaff’? ‘Sir Stephen Derby’ is Sir Stephen to you. To redeem these slips I kept wanting The Tragical Historie of Arthur’s not quite comic pastiche to flip over into parody, and give me lines like the sublime ‘Oh, saucy Worcester, dost ...”

“... their way to the crash site, but there are more interesting lapses. According to the note his aide Stephen Cambone made of the conversation, at 2.40 p.m., still in the command centre, Rumsfeld told General Richard Myers, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to find the ‘best info fast … judge whether good enough [to] hit SH @ same time – not only ...”

“... who had previously lived under the easy-going rule of Croesus the Lydian, and had received a sharp rebuff when they tried to get a similar deal from Cyrus, approached the Spartans for a protective alliance. The Spartans, notoriously shy of overseas commitments, refused their request; but they did, Herodotus tells us, send a diplomatic mission to ...”

“... believe these are serious questions, requiring patient and scholarly rebuttal? Afrocentrism, says Stephen Howe, comes in two varieties. The first is an interest in Africa and its culture reinforced by the belief ‘that Eurocentric bias has blocked or distorted knowledge of Africans and their cultures’. Although it has been around for some time, it has been ...”

“... the Blunt affair a couple of years ago. Death has claimed another considerable historian: Captain Stephen Roskill RN, who died on 4 November. Roskill had an active-service career almost until he reached the age of 50 and started as an historian when lesser mortals think of retirement. In 1949 he became the Official Naval Historian and produced The War at Sea ...”

“... Termite again: The ragged cat drags its belly across where the grass is short and the stones are sharp, under the lilacs that have no flowers. The flower smell is gone and the white falls off the trees. Seeds, Lark says, little seeds with parachutes to fly them, Termite, all in your hair, and she runs her fingers through his hair, saying how long and how ...”

“... Skinner, Audrey Wise, Ken Coates, most of the activists in his Bristol constituency, even his son Stephen – advised him to do so. Benn’s own belief, often expressed here, that the power and influence that mattered came from below, from the shop stewards and socialist trade-unionists, led logically to a resignation and a return to the rank and file. But he ...”

“... modern humans appeared in Europe. The migration of Homo erectus out of Africa is accompanied by a sharp divergence of scientific opinion about what happened next. Some believe that the racial diversity in modern human form can be traced back to the regional variants of Homo erectus, more than a million years ago. For example, modern Europeans evolved from ...”

“... Canadian High Commission. It was not, for him, a coup de foudre. His first impression of her was sharp-eyed and ambivalent. She struck him as ‘well-dressed, middle-aged with the air of being the somewhat worldly wife of a don, a narrow intelligent face, watching eyes and a cruel, witty mouth’. His second impression, just seven months later, was that she ...”

“... to embrace the former course, too much a personal conformist, wanting a nice house, a good income, sharp clothes and good schools for his children, for the latter. Instead he created his own model, that of the rational dissident, the Olympian critic who does not threaten society but who can remind it how foolish it will look in the future when most of its ...”

“... to obtain their statements, just as they had to secure the confession of one of the Cardiff Three, Stephen Miller.Even when police officers are successfully prosecuted, the convictions they were involved in often remain unexamined. Since 2018 the Court of Appeal has quashed convictions in a string of cases involving Detective Sergeant Derek Ridgewell of the ...”

“... dominant, or most recurrent, styles in American writing have been the rhapsodic and the paranoid. Stephen Fender’s excellent book points directly to what we might call the organising ambiguity of American literature by bringing together in his title ‘plotting’ and the ‘West’. A specific geographical West, to be sure – his (superbly annotated) book ...”

“... in 1981 of a book focused on England: Patronage in the Renaissance, edited by Guy Lytle and Stephen Orgel. Taking their cue from Lytle and Orgel, F.W. Kent and Patricia Simons have turned the proceedings of a conference held in Melbourne in 1983 into a valuable volume of essays on patronage in Renaissance Italy. What is particularly interesting about ...”

“... of Robert Cecil’s ‘painefull daies, your many watchfull nights’. He wasn’t exaggerating. Stephen Alford’s All His Spies is an account of a man at the heart of power, but it isn’t exactly a biography, or a work of political history; it might be better described as a voyage through a landscape of political crisis, seen through the eyes of his ...”

“... canal company finally had to pay him to go away. The turning point, however, was not as neat or sharp as my account so far may have suggested. Cottenham, on appeal, had affirmed an order made against Dimes by the vice-chancellor, the senior judge of the chancery division of the High Court, restraining him from interfering with the canal. When Dimes finally ...”