“... glazes, from pearlescent creamware (called ‘Queensware’ after Queen Charlotte bought a table service) to black ‘basalt’, which was matte and sooty as a lump of coal and often painted with red figures in imitation of ancient vases. Wedgwood was always trying to make his vases seem ‘un-pot-like’, to lift them out of the earthy associations of clay ...”

“... is the effect pit bulls have on essayists. To report the affair at all was to become a nark in the service of the agents of ‘dirty realism’. Bill Sikes and his mutt looked fearsome, but they were no more implicated in the crime’s leisurely aftermath than I was. But why, at this point in our culture, do we choose to invoke the dog, the ‘prime ...”

“... of the sunshine soldier – going to Cadet Corps parades and cotillions while carefully avoiding service at the front and stressing ‘preparedness’ at home. By 1917, with the country’s first Red Scare getting into its stride, young J. Edgar was an enthusiastic snooper, chasing down aliens and subversives as if they were the same thing. (He recommended ...”

“... finance: namely, that the monarch became a taxpayer. In 1842, the then Tory prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, reintroduced income tax, which had previously been levied on a temporary basis during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The Queen was determined – or advised, the documentation is incomplete – that ‘her own income should be subject to a ...”

“... Bogdanov trained initially as a doctor. He progressed by the usual steps from philanthropic service to the poor, to political radicalism, and by the turn of the century was a Bolshevik. At the time of writing Red Star, Bogdanov and Lenin were comrades-in-arms, with Bogdanov the fiercer of the two doctrinally. As a physician, Bogdanov did useful research ...”

“... in Modernist manifestos, another – Perpetua – provided titling for Coronation orders of service. He was a radical conservative who saw little in the world that would not be improved by a return to good old ways and good old days – yet he worked willingly and successfully with modern machinery. His writing about ...”

“... on his khaki shirt: he is wearing the B.P. hat – to which American boys are fully entitled. Robert Baden-Powell, a skilled dress-designer, ordered those cowboy hats from the States in 1900 when he was kitting out his nurses and constables in Africa. B.P. has recorded: ‘They were known in the trade as “Boss of the Plains” or ...”

“... an artist without understanding his relationship to Diego, yet Lord is – with the exception of Robert Wernick – the first writer on him to do justice to that subject. He delineates subtly and accurately the relationship they seemed to have when one knew them, in middle age and onwards. And he unearths events and habits in their childhood and youth which ...”

“... and Hertfordshire as well as Glamis, the Scottish estate granted to an ancestor, Sir John Lyon, by Robert II in 1372. While not especially wealthy by the standards of the aristocracy of her day, they can have had no anxieties about their place in society, any more than Elizabeth, tucked snugly in towards the bottom of a large and affectionate family, seems to ...”

“... effort, a novel about a historian of the Nazis who is also a Nazi sympathiser – in 1995, Robert Kelly, in a somewhat grudging review in the New York Times, spoke honestly about the prompt reviewer’s quandary: ‘It is not much comfort to lay aside this infuriating and offensive masterpiece and call it a satire, as if a genre could heal the wounds ...”

“... treated his heroine without mercy. In The Testament of Cresseid, a sequel by the Scots poet Robert Henryson, Cresseid is reduced to prostitution and – by counsel of the gods – stricken with leprosy. Chaucer borrowed the plots of both ‘The Knight’s Tale’ and Troilus and Criseyde from Boccaccio, who was still alive during his first trip to ...”

“... and non-transparent. There was considerable overlap of responsibilities, and the existing civil service was marginalised. Rural administration and military support depended on the uncertain loyalties of regional commanders, who in turn relied on half-amateur personal militias. Many people had associated with the Taliban during their five years as the Kabul ...”

“... of blood sacrifice, whereby Ireland might be spiritually resurrected. Pearse’s own cult of Robert Emmet, the doomed leader of the insurrection of 1803, has tended to reinforce this view. Wolfe Tone, the republican leader of the 1798 rebellion, the largest in Irish history, was the most revered of all Irish nationalists, but though Tone’s centenary ...”

“... the ‘shared experiences’ (one thinks of those thousands of Irishmen who volunteered for service in the British Army even after the Easter Rising in 1916) occur only at the end when he talks briefly of the book he has not written. Instead, invasion, rebellion and persecution wash down the centuries, lit up by vivid contemporary documents. It is good ...”

“... And there is one soldier (played by Jim Caviezel) who is a drifter unconvinced by the duties of service. For the rest it is a film about a band of men encumbered by weapons and uniforms in an Eden they do not comprehend or even notice. The big attack is desperate and bloody enough for military enthusiasts. But this is also a film about insects and grasses ...”