“... he had complained about his bad press: he supposes he must have found it ‘painful, having been a young lion of the Sixties, generally encouraged by the media, to find myself an abused figure of the Seventies. Don’t ever believe anyone who says that a bad press doesn’t hurt.’ Old diaries often surprise their authors: they ought to tidy them up, before ...”

“... did not give the right signals. The representation of employers was equally defective. Sir Edward Herbert died before the Report had been signed. Mr R.B. Southall and Sir David Anderson ‘belonged’, in Mr Carswell’s words, ‘to the silent minority’. All four members of the ‘inner group’, as Mr Carswell defines it, were academics. The most ...”

“... with the ground-floor bay window and the attic, at 40 Richmond Road, Leicester, where William Edward Snow and his wife Ada Sophia brought up their family of four sons. Ada Sophia had a nose like that of the most distinguished of her sons, with a slight downward curve. She had ‘dignity of bearing’ – another resemblance to the future baron, for ‘he ...”

“... is still possible to argue, the finest of their period. Auden’s scrupulous editor and executor, Edward Mendelson, has invariably respected and supported the poet’s decisions, but manages to have it both ways by including in a separate volume, The English Auden, the original versions of poems that were later either revised or rejected. This expensive ...”

“... in the Cambridge of the 1820s, of the ladies of the town whom there is no reason to suppose that young Charles frequented. ‘Simple, childlike, painstaking, effective’ – Harriet Martineau’s judgment was precise. This is not obviously the stuff of high drama and seething passions: but high drama and seething passions for Desmond and Moore are what ...”

“... Magness explains in Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth, there were good reasons for the young country to think of the site as ‘a symbol of Jewish heroism, the Zionist enterprise, and the state of Israel’. ‘The notion that heroic Jewish freedom fighters held out against the mighty Roman Empire to the bitter end countered the image of millions ...”

“... earlier. (Associated as it is with a sexually transmitted disease, and administered mostly to young women, the HPV vaccine has been an alembic for all sorts of fear and anxiety around female sexuality.) In the weeks following the initial hospitalisations, another 75 girls from the same school came forward with similar symptoms; before long, five hundred ...”

“... Crowson), made when he read Baldwin’s skilful statement to the Commons on the abdication of Edward VIII: ‘He is a veritable Bagstock of a fellow – “deep, deep and devilish sly, is tough old Joe, sir.”’ But tough old Stan was only doing what a politician, or indeed anyone else at large in the world, has to do. Posing is a necessary part of ...”

“... two differences. In Huston’s version, one of the doctors attending the demonstration is the young Freud himself, fresh off the train from Vienna. And, more significant, while in Brouillet’s painting the audience’s eyes converge on a female subject who fully obeys the will of her Master, Huston also portrays a male patient, no less hysterical and ...”

“... who was getting married, was no secret; he broadcast the fact in frequent asides about fanciable young men or even small boys. But he had also begun to live a double life, sidelining his wife, Penelope Chetwode, a field marshal’s daughter (whom he nicknamed ‘Philth’) in favour of his mistress, the Hon. Elizabeth Cavendish, a duke’s sister ...”

“... century, arguments against higher education for women were awash with scientific misinformation: Edward Clarke, author of the bestselling Sex in Education, or A Fair Chance for the Girls (1873), was well in line with mainstream science when he claimed that ‘the rigours of study during the menstrual period would destroy a woman’s reproductive ...”

“... in exploring the sliver of political space between irony and bigotry. Among them is Toby Young, who originally found fame as the butt of his own joke with his memoir How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (2001). The game is a quest for attention, and humorous transgression is the key skill in winning it. Another name for it is ...”

“... family annuities expired. He so inhabited his dour poetic persona that his friend and publisher Edward Hookham, writing to the Literary Fund, ‘had but too just reason to dread that the Fate of Chatterton might be that of Peacock’. The committee awarded him £30. Numerous failed courtships intensified the gloom. Peacock was, his cousin remembered, ‘a ...”

“... Roosevelt (‘the greatest publicity man of that time’, according to Sinclair), who sent the young author a three-page analysis of The Jungle and an invitation to visit him at the White House for further discussion. These events led directly to the passing of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act (although not, to Sinclair’s ...”

“... in the American South. In this wave of iconoclasm, Cecil Rhodes, Silent Sam, Robert E. Lee and Edward Colston were practically surrogates for each other in a transnational story of empire, colonialism and slavery – a story that demanded retelling with renewed attention to its victims. Like some businesses, churches and government agencies, universities ...”