“... philosophy. As a youth, Melbourne spent two winters in Glasgow, living plainly and studying with John Millar, disciple of David Hume and Adam Smith, and one of the most influential proselytisers for the Scottish Enlightenment. This experience gave him a strong commitment to the principles of political economy; it also profoundly influenced his thinking on ...”

“... in the south-eastern hamlet of Saint-Etienne de Saint-Geoirs foreshadowed his career as a bandit king. But his father’s early death pushed the family towards increasingly risky business ventures. In 1748, the 23-year-old Louis signed a large contract to supply French army camps in the Italian Alps with food, and together with two partners organised a ...”

“... of Robeson’s music was even more problematic. He was happy enough to perform songs like ‘John Brown’s Body’ and ‘Old Man River’, written by whites about what the blacks must be suffering, but he thought jazz had been ‘debased’ by white influence. When someone in a Des Moines audience asked for ‘St Louis Blues’, Robeson’s manager ...”

“... add up to a portrayal. The same is true of people Ashton appears to approve of. He tells us that John Pym had skill and statesmanship and that he was a leader of the ‘middle-group’. He is also allowed a few bit-appearances during the various Parliamentary episodes of the 1620s, but that is about it, which seems too little for someone whose role in the ...”

“... arranged,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, disparaging the kind of fiction associated with Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells. It’s a proposition that might appeal to Simon Okotie. But before deciding whether it has merit he would want to see whether an apparently symmetrical arrangement of gig-lamps might not, on close examination, prove ever so ...”

“... in a rural-gothic social network of ‘smuglars’ and witches. Its narrator, Fred Rolfe, ‘king of the Norfolk poachers’, was the grandson of a witch, and several of her spells are included in the book. If you want to gain control of someone, find a walking toad with a yellow ring round its neck, then put it in a perforated box and bury it in a black ...”

“... English aristocracy has always been hard to draw, and perhaps never more so than in the case of John Charles Wallop, third Earl of Portsmouth. Born in 1767 at the family’s Hampshire residence of Hurstbourne Park, Wallop grew into a child who betrayed signs of being what his contemporaries would have called a simpleton. He was sent to be tutored by the ...”

“... Her account supplements the existing European language scholarship on the Macartney saga by John Cranmer-Byng, Alain Peyrefitte, James Hevia, John Watt and others, redirecting our attention to those who did the real work of communicating.The Chinese world order (or ‘tributary system’) that Macartney sought to ...”

“... find it hard to do so – for instance, when Falstaff disappears, or rather turns into Sir John Oldcastle, since it is known that in early performances (though not in any printed form of the plays) that is what he was called. Oldcastle’s descendants protested, and the consequence was the presumably unique disclaimer in the Epilogue to 2 Henry IV. The ...”

“... Should we read the darkest of his plays – including Measure for Measure, Timon of Athens, King Lear and Macbeth – as artefacts of these plague-ridden times? Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists delved into almost every dark corner of their audiences’ imaginations: murder, witchcraft, incest, civil war, apostasy. Playgoers saw rape victims stagger ...”

“... of Wales asked his father, George V, if he could have the use of Fort Belvedere at Windsor the king was surprised: ‘What could you possibly want that queer old place for? Those damn week-ends I suppose.’ He caved in and perhaps regretted it, for the weekends with their associated guests and amusements made possible the affair with Wallis Simpson and so ...”

“... came to Buckingham Palace in 1945 to present a loyal address at the end of World War Two, the king asked who these people were. ‘Some call them Quakers, Your Majesty.’ ‘Oh,’ the king said. ‘I didn’t know that there were any of them left.’ According to the protocols of sociologists of religion, the Quakers ...”

“... One day in 1950 I walked down Crown Passage, an alley between King Street and Pall Mall, to call on the Falcon Press in pursuit of money they owed me. The managing director Peter Baker had left letters unanswered and telephone calls unreturned, and sure enough he was out. I saw instead a harassed long-nosed man in a blue suit who said his name was Paul Scott, and that he was the company secretary ...”

“... order to save manpower. The Belgian élite wanted to avoid repeating the refusals of 1914-18, when King Albert I had held out heroically in an unoccupied corner of his country, while the vast majority of his citizens froze and starved under direct military occupation. The economy was closed down for what had been expected to be a brief hiatus, and the only ...”

“... for whom a palpably existent house is more important than a precise location. (The writer John Ryle reports a novel spin on this: he was shown round the house by a guide who maintained adamantly that it had once been the home of Rembrandt.) On the day of the inauguration Harar was abuzz with dignitaries and a concomitantly heavy presence of police and ...”