“... success. The Africa to which Haggard now returned had been partitioned by – as the jokers said – ‘everybody but the Swiss’. The Dutch had long ago introduced a thrawn and turbulent element in the Boers; besides the British, there were the Germans, Belgians, Portuguese, French, Spanish and Italians. Africans were entitled to look on this as the ...”

“... left lapel, and carried a black and white skunk bag she was ‘inhumanly fond of’. No woman, she said, should wear a bra that cost less than $50 at Saks. Maeve Brennan photographed by Karl Bissinger in 1948 There are plenty of photographs of Brennan, but the one I remember is Karl Bissinger’s from 1948. Her black collar is high, and her eyes look ...”

“... knew or half-knew that making such changes stick was likely to mean that at some point the battles Edward Heath had lost in 1972 and 1974 would have to be fought again and won. Jim Prior had been a ‘hawk’ in early 1974 and had wanted Heath to call a general election for the beginning of February; the delayed call and the half-hearted way the election was ...”

“... was barred to him. He often complained of the Trinity culture, and had mixed feelings about Edward Dowden, TCD’s celebrated professor of English, a friend of his father’s whom he had known well in his youth; Dowden was too lukewarm, too English, as he himself might have become had he gone to the College. Later there was a time when Yeats ...”

“... for war’ but ‘a particularly corruptible man’. Philip II, who reigned from 1180 to 1223, is said to have neither valued nor understood gaiety, but he did like money. He forced the Jews to leave his kingdom and confiscated their property, and claimed 20 per cent of the debts Christians owed to Jews after these were cancelled. Some of the revenue was ...”

“... reading to the merely knowable. Auden’s nursery library was also stocked with Beatrix Potter, Edward Lear and Harry Graham. And George had a passion for Norse legends, believing as he did that the Audens could themselves be traced back to the land of Thor: ‘In my father’s library, scientific books stood side by side with works of poetry and ...”

“... Constable to support a case for defamation against Stephen Pentecost. Pentecost’s witnesses said Tanner couldn’t be trusted: he was ‘a poore needy fellow’ with ‘a little cottage of his owne to dwell in … and noe other meanes to live’. One claimed he ‘could not find whereof he [Tanner] could levye xx s’; others that he was ‘much ...”

“... the syndrome now known as ‘chronic traumatic encephalopathy’ (CTE). Eight years later Dr Edward Carroll Jr wrote an article called ‘Punch Drunk’ in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences: ‘No head blow is taken with impunity, and each knock-out causes definite and irreparable damage. If such trauma is repeated for a long enough period, it ...”

“... In the years before the outbreak of the First World War, the volatile and charismatic lawyer Edward Carson, together with his energetic deputy James Craig, mobilised Ulster Protestants of all classes to resist Home Rule. Carson, who had served as solicitor-general in Lord Salisbury’s Administration, colluded in the illegal shipment of 25,000 rifles and ...”

“... a kind of mutual respect. ‘Don’t touch the cloud-dweller,’ Stalin is supposed to have said about him, and the assumption is that the tyrant, who had a nose for such things, sensed that Pasternak was no threat to him but was admiring him in his own peculiar way. The poet Gumilov, Akhmatova’s husband, had actually taken part in an anti-Bolshevik ...”

“... to an Elizabethan bishop, ‘if London were reformed, all the realm would soon follow.’ As was said of another metropolis and the cause of Catholic Counter-Reformation: ‘to purge Rome would be to purge the world.’ From this it follows that London and the Reformation contains at one and the same time an important account of national events, from a ...”

“... of this early instance of self – mortification other than to note that a Jewish friend said of it: ‘That’s very Jewish.’ All one learns of Joseph’s marriage, which took place in 1951, is that his bride was an American and photogenic and that in 1978 a single-sentence statement recorded in the press that they had ‘decided to live ...”

“... misleading. It is better understood as having been distilled from ‘I must be seeing things’, said seriously, and with a fair amount of stress on the ‘I must’. The greatest difficulty for the poet is how to go on being one. Randall Jarrell set it out like this at the end of his essay on Stevens: ‘A man who is a good poet at 40 may turn out to be a ...”

“... You are going much too fast,’ Mrs Thatcher said on the News at One on Friday, 10 November, ‘first Poland, then Hungary, then – er, Czechoslovakia, now Eastern Germany ... ’. Heigh-ho, this was Neville Chamberlain’s ‘Czechoslovakia’ all over again, the far-away country of which we know little. The second half of the sentence was omitted from the television interview shown later that day ...”

“... Brecht’s Fear and Misery in the Third Reich on bicycles. We are not told what the critics said about this event. Was it an experience to lift the soul on wings, a mind-blowing epiphany? Or was it in the same class as a file of messenger boys delivering pizzas on unicycles? The author, Pryor Dodge, withholds his own opinion. He is introduced to us, not ...”