“... its leading figures have been forgotten, or, in the case of the party’s first prime minister, James Ramsay MacDonald, disowned. The Labour left, then and since, thought the new administration was too timid and had failed to promote socialism. The centre and right of the party felt that the experience of 1924 had confirmed the dangers of taking office ...”

“... is debatable. The OED defines it, capaciously enough, as ‘of, relating to, or characteristic of William Hogarth or his style; resembling or characteristic of the subjects depicted in Hogarth’s work’, and explains that ‘much of the work of Hogarth is characterised by the use of satire to examine questions of morality, and often features vivid ...”

“... one reason he slotted so well into its pages. His heroes were the great humourists of the 1940s, James Thurber and S.J. Perelman, and, like them, he often wrote of beleaguered men who struggle with a world that seems to be ...”

“... house behind the Tower of London down Seething Lane. They were to visit one of Sam’s superiors, William Batten, surveyor of the navy. The custom was that women should take the first man they saw as their Valentine, so long as he was no relation. The previous year, Elizabeth had selected her own beau; this time it was all planned to further Sam’s new ...”

“... that anti-semitism has been, among other things, Christian. ‘I could never understand how William Empson, a poet and critic I revere, could hate Christians and especially Catholics, thinking their religion nothing but a sordid cult of blood and sacrifice. Christ’s blood was the form of his own suffering, he didn’t recommend bloodletting for other ...”

“... that one might expect to find is barely in evidence. Faraday, unlike such Oxbridge scientists as William Buckland, Adam Sedgwick or William Whewell, refrained from burdening science with proofs of design. As one who believed that knowledge of God was to be obtained through the plain teaching of Scripture, he regarded ...”

“... when you understand all that, you may just be able to understand how they manage to present James Joyce as a man devoted to the God who was satisfied by the crucifixion.’ Whereupon he at once vaults into a new paragraph which yet keeps the previous one alive: ‘The concordat was reached over his dead body.’ It is one of his most searching ...”

“... intervals, the volumes plopped from the press, 63 in all, from Jacques Abbadie in 1885 to William Zuylestein in 1900, containing some thirty thousand pages on which 650 contributors recorded the details of 30,000 lives. And, as with the painting of the Forth Bridge, once this great Victorian monument was completed it was time to start all over ...”

“... things the Abstract Expressionists did were implied, and very often achieved, by the mid-Fifties. William Sietz’s book has no illustrations later than that, and his history does not seem truncated. He caught the movement at the point where it was becoming commercially successful. The city which had brought together de Kooning from Holland, Rothko from ...”

“... Iranians, was a case of the peasant doffing the cap to the landlord. One sees it occasionally in William Forbis’s Fall of the Peacock Throne, where he talks about the Shah’s ‘courteous concern for putting me at my ease’. But the most extreme example was a lavishly-produced book by the photographer Roloff Benny called Iran: Elements of Destiny and ...”

“... she certainly undertook such a mission to Antwerp, where she contacted a Cromwellian exile called William Scot, offering him a pardon in exchange for information on alleged Dutch plans to invade England with the help of other banished republicans. (Hence her routine description in literature textbooks as ‘playwright and spy’.) After this paradoxically ...”

“... killed us’, when they were divided over Gerald Shove. Not everyone was happy to join. From James Strachey’s letters, Lubenow takes a wonderful account of the nearly botched election of Gordon Luce in 1912; asked to meet the Apostles at breakfast, ‘Luce looked wild, with bloodshot eyes and dishevelled hair. He seemed frightened, angry, and according ...”

“... for such treatment. He was extremely intelligent. Leaving aside Henry VIII, Charles II and William III, he was perhaps our cleverest King since the Middle Ages. He had polished manners, and was also musical, a lover of literature and a patron of the arts. But there his virtues ended. He was selfish, idle, self-pitying, cruel and unscrupulous. Nor were ...”

“... to George Wyatt, full of ‘devilish devices’; her life was ‘shameful to rehearse’, William Thomas said, defending the reputation of his recently deceased sovereign Henry VIII to an Italian audience. The story of Anne Boleyn is one which serious historians have tried to get right, according to the normal protocols of historical ...”

“... The title refers to the assurance on the limits of Nato expansion given to Mikhail Gorbachev by James Baker, then US secretary of state, in 1990. The Soviet Union had stationed troops in East Germany since the liberation of Berlin; in 1990 they numbered 380,000. Gorbachev was in a strong position militarily. In all other respects, however, he was ...”