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“... anti-communist line held against fashionable opinion in the 1960s and after by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. It also contains a letter from Amis to Christopher Hitchens, which is needling enough (‘Do you admire terror? I know you admire freedom’) in the rhetorical pressure it applies on an old friend to renounce Lenin, Trotsky and all their ...”

“... Convention of 1907. Francis Younghusband was more or less born into the Great Game. His uncle was Robert Shaw, British Political Agent in Yarkand; his father was John Younghusband, Inspector-General of Police in the Punjab, and occasional lecturer on the Russian menace. At school at Clifton, his great friend was Henry Newbolt (‘The sand of the desert is ...”

“... work The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (1957) showed that interpretations of the Norman Conquest, including its implications for law and government, were central to political controversy during the Stuart era. Were the events of 1066 and after a conquest of the native Anglo-Saxons, imposing newfangled feudal ...”

“... and yawn-producing. He resigned the Conservative Whip in 1936 when sanctions against the Italian conquest of Abyssinia were abandoned. Few people were startled when he accepted it again a year later, but this was because few noticed that he had ever resigned it. He became a part of the group against ‘appeasement’, but he was not an outstanding or very ...”

“... Some responded – not Amis, I notice, and not Larkin, for reasons no doubt easily guessed at; but Conquest, doyen of the group, co-operated, and so did Davie, who is quoted more than anybody, though in my view (and in that of certain members of the group) he was never really in the middle of it, partly because he was an interloper from Cambridge, and partly ...”

“... of as normal classic names: Simon, Mark, Peter, Andrew, Paul, Martin, Michael, Stephen, Richard, Robert, David. Girls’ names remained more modish: some Sarahs, Anns and Elizabeths and even some residual Marys, but also plenty of Janets, Jackies, Lisas and Debbies, who soared and plummeted through the bestseller lists in the space of a couple of ...”

“... control and profit-taking – at its most explicit in the siting of royal castles built after the Conquest. But if growth is a feature of, say, the last two centuries of Anglo-Saxon rule and if Romanist revised population estimates are correct, then what are we to make of a Domesday (1086) population of roughly two million? Clearly the Anglo-Saxon period can ...”

“... scale of the loss accounts for Flodden’s place in the history of Scotland. Writing in the 1560s, Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie claimed that on the night the army left Edinburgh, a ghostly voice named a long list of individuals summoned to appear before the devil within forty days. Only one of them returned from Flodden. Artists, writers and musicians have ...”

“... The ruling class of England, and much of the rest of Britain, was re-created by the Norman Conquest. Most of the nobly born have at one time or another sought to find progenitors among the Companions of the Conqueror, and the words ‘noble’, ‘gentle’ and ‘aristocrat’ themselves come from French. Within two decades, the ...”

“... James I, ‘took a little Mislike’ to it and it fizzled out. Charles I made the antiquary Robert Cotton close his famous library, thinking it seditious. Suspected at various times of anti-Stuart sympathies, closet Catholicism, republicanism, even as late as 1797 the antiquaries could be denounced by George III as a ‘Popish cabal’. Still, they ...”

“... on the Yemeni border, to the Saudi dominions. By 1926, he had realised his final ambition, the conquest of the Hejaz, Islam’s holy land. The way had unwittingly been smoothed for him by the British, who had helped the local ruler, the Sherif Hussein, to remove the Turks. The Sherif was a vain and foolish old man with ambitions far beyond his ...”

“... attempt to identify a ‘real’ Robin Hood was made 130 years ago by Joseph Hunter, who spotted a Robert Hood at Wakefield in 1316-17 and a ‘Robyn Hode, porter’ in the royal chamber in 1324. Since the Gest envisages a tour of the North by ‘Edwarde, our comly kynge’ as the context of Robin’s pardon and entry into royal service, and since Edward II is ...”

“... rate, the beginnings of empire were everywhere violent and brutish, from the moment when Spain’s conquest of Mexico ‘gave Europeans a new and potent myth’, the conviction of one European as equal to twenty others which for a very long time events seemed to confirm. Nor was there any steady improvement later: relapses into ferocity were recurrent. What ...”

“... It was thus particularly fitting for him to write of ‘the lucky moment’ when sexual conquest is made easy, even inevitable, by the fortunate and unpredictable conjunction of opportunity and desire in partners who might at other times be incompatible. Conversely, its opposite, the moment when effort seeks to replace spontaneity, is responsible ...”

“... a fading sort of way Alfred the Great, are readily fitted into stories of national defiance. Pre-Conquest successes, like Bede and Offa and the highly creditable story of the English conversion and the missions to Germany and Scandinavia – these are no longer part of the national myth. Harriet Harvey Wood’s book in a sense restates and in a sense tries ...”