“... replaced the wisdom of the ancestors. ‘Till about the yeare 1649,’ Aubrey wrote, it was ‘held a strange presumption for a man to attempt an innovation in learning; and not to be good manners to be more knowing than his neighbours and forefathers.’ As the Christian narrative of the Fall gave way to a sense of history as progress and steady ...”

“... for retirement in an orderly way’. The PEP in question was General Augusto Pinochet, who held between $6 and $8 million in offshore accounts established by Riggs, and is now being investigated for fraud and embezzlement. Jersey became an offshore finance centre as a result of pressure from local law firms, some with strong political connections, and ...”

“... sacrifice his life to the national cause, and that was the measure of his worth. Norwid, however, held that it was a violation of natural rights to relate the meaning of human life to armed struggle and to nothing else. He mocked the ‘forlorn hope’ gestures, the over-dramatised martyrology. In all this he saw an anti-intellectualism, a contempt for ...”

“... absurdities, its partings and comings together, its superstructure of sexual theory, is very well held, and although we’re asked to see the story rather more from the wife’s point of view than the husband’s, Maddox won’t give her the benefit of outraged or sentimental feminism; she even dares to speak of ‘Frieda’s tedious insistence that she was ...”

“... ruthless towards former lovers. This cannot be quite right: people as cold and hard as Sharp is held to have been do not destroy themselves in alcoholic depression and self-loathing. That kind of behaviour is surely evidence more of emotional turmoil. The world of Edwardian leftish journalism inhabited by Sharp was dominated by two opposed currents. A ...”

“... came to Ethiopia in 1769 to look for the source of the Nile and took away with him the Songs of David, Kibre Negest (‘Glory of the Kings’) and the Book of Enoch, which he no doubt considered as souvenirs or going-home presents to himself. As well as being a sacred artefact, the Kibre Negest relates much of Ethiopia’s early history. It was returned to ...”

“... preoccupied him. He made no public comment on the Easter Rising in 1916, and for the most part held himself aloof from Ireland’s struggle for political independence.Frank Callanan, a distinguished barrister and historian who died in 2021 leaving this magnificently erudite book unfinished, devotes its many pages to demonstrating that the young Joyce, like ...”

“... of the university was begun on the family’s estate in Palo Alto.It opened in 1891. Classes were held in the Quad, but to anyone visiting at the time the educational mission would have seemed secondary to the commemorative. There was a Memorial Church, a Memorial Arch, a museum for Leland Jr’s bric-à-brac – jade bird, beaded necklace – and a mausoleum ...”

“... former colonies around the world, Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia and Southeast Asia, who held an automatic right of entry into Britain’. They also violated Article 3(2) of the Fourth Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights, which stipulated that ‘No one shall be deprived of the right to enter his own country,’ and Article 5(d) of ...”

“... was keeping an eye on a crypto-Fascist, anti-semitic organisation known as the Right Club. It held its meetings above a South Kensington restaurant called the Russian Tea Rooms. Among its luminaries was Anna Wolkoff, daughter of the restaurant’s expatriate proprietors. She and her co-members were pledged to obstruct the war effort. Among other ...”

“... painted glass. Iconoclasm fights idolatry, but reform meets resistance from traditional custom, held dear by the commons – the same ‘very simple and unlearned people’ whose souls Cranmer would save from ‘beads, pardons, pilgrimages and such other like popery’, but who crave earthly sustenance, protection and fairness.The story begins with ...”

“... people whose accents and bearing remind him of the place he knows best. When he was still being held in relatively civilised conditions in Pakistan at the start of his captivity, when he still imagined an imminent release, he was relieved to see two MI5 agents, a man and a woman, simply because they were British, until he realised they weren’t going to ...”

“... Exchange Building. In 1993, one man, George Heron, had been acquitted of her murder; now another, David Boyd, was about to stand trial.In 1992, Sunderland’s shipyards had closed down, Monkwearmouth colliery was about to be mothballed and, though Liebherr cranes still tilted their long necks across the docks, and Nissan was mass-producing Primeras and Micras ...”

“... sentiment in Liverpool. But there were more Leylands than Roscoes, and not just because, as David Eltis reminds us in his deeply researched new book, slavery was accepted across most of the early modern world. No one wanted to be a slave, except when the alternative was being executed after a battle, or made a human sacrifice, but the institution was ...”

“... and low taxation, many of its elderly members – and some of its politicians – have long held to a more cautious ethos of middle-class respectability, restraint and downright frugality. In theory, these Conservatives wished to roll back the restrictions of the socialist state; in practice, many of them reckoned that wartime rationing had been good ...”