“... at coherence imposed from above. Coherence came rather from the common understanding of the English national past (the ‘Whig’ interpretation of history in the strict sense) which was diffused through all levels of the cultural community – writers, teachers, readers. What made the series so successful was, above all, the colossal commercial ...”

“... the end of the month he was caught up in the Massacre of St Bartholomew, a cowering refugee in the English Embassy; whence he was rescued by a French nobleman who thought it amusing to take him with other voyeurs to inspect the mangled corpse of Admiral Coligny, lying where it had fallen on the cobbles. By this time he had made the acquaintance of some ...”

“... is remembered as an extraordinary episode in the life of Hector Berlioz. Appearing in the 1827 English theatre season in Paris, she took the city by storm – lithographs of her as the mad Ophelia were in every prinitshop window. Ladies of fashion demanded coiffure ‘à la Miss Smithson’ – a black veil with wisps of straw tastefully interwoven amongst ...”

“... to his strange relationship to tradition. He used and adapted the tone of the great masters of English eloquence: Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Hazlitt, Emerson and Henry James. He brought, he wrote, ‘a special attitude’ to Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, to the stones of Paris, to the cathedral of Chartres, and to the Empire State Building . . . These were ...”

“... time, by deposing John and inviting Prince Louis of France, soon to be Louis VIII, to assume the English throne, they were insisting that the king’s rule was conditional on good behaviour and the Great Council had the right to depose an unjust monarch. This menacing proviso too lurked in the background throughout Henry’s reign, surfacing for example in ...”

“... return on 17 June, with all games to be played without spectators. What the Premier League CEO, Richard Masters, has called ‘the behind closed doors product’ will be a very different viewing experience from the one we’re used to. Computer-generated fans have been mooted. Work is reportedly underway on an app that will make it possible for fans to ...”

“... All the paintings there were by Klimt and all the music by Mahler. No, there were also special Richard Strauss evenings, and the cafés played Johann Strauss waltzes all the time. Everyone was analysed by Freud, but it didn’t make any difference. They were very rich and they had terrific furniture. Many of them were waiting for a bit part in La ...”

“... Taylor said the film was ‘not at all bad’ when she saw it again in 1971. We learn this from Richard Burton’s Diaries. Burton himself ‘popped in at one point for about ten seconds and went away and slept’. ‘No reflection on the film’, he adds, but it’s hard not to believe that another film might have detained him a little longer. Taylor was ...”

“... than any other film he had ever made. Brief Encounter, however, is something else again. As Richard Dyer points out in his excellent BFI book on the film, it is the awkwardness of the main characters, played by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, their touching, strangling inability either to deny their feelings or fully act on them, that makes them so ...”

“... Gaelic accidents’. There has been no better expression of the deeply Scottish suspicion that the English might be having more fun than we are. ‘Stop the world, Scotland wants to get on,’ the SNP’s Winnie Ewing announced after her shock victory in the 1967 Hamilton by-election, which sent the British government into a panic about the hitherto ...”

“... of their argument and the dramatic purpose of their work. Anyone over forty who went to an English public school where Confirmation Classes, the Cadet Corps and O-Level History were unshakable elements of the natural order will remember the Whig Interpretation. Schoolroom history began with the proposition that the Stuart kings were a bad lot, given to ...”

“... extended far beyond Cambridge, and even beyond the schools in which his loyal followers taught English and from which, if they could, they sent their pupils to Downing College for more advanced indoctrination by the master or his acolytes. As a provincial student in the late Thirties I was scolded for impudently and prematurely imitating his ...”

“... and purgatory. More radical religious articles were briefly promulgated, and a Bible in English made available to all, though soon the Six Articles and King’s Book put forward a much more Catholic view of religion, and in 1543 reading the Bible was restricted by law to the higher social groups. More definitely Protestant measures were adopted in ...”

“... in folds of red velvet and a background balustrade, and behind it some generic, dull afternoon English parkland. By such means ‘His Majesty’s picture drawer’ supplied a lofty ‘whole-length’ – probably intended for the gallery of a German palace in order to seal some alliance – in 1628. Portrait of Charles I and Henrietta Maria by Van Dyck ...”

“... the category we have come to know, and take for granted, as ‘public opinion’. In the 1970s, Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man made Habermas’s argument more concrete and detailed: late 17th and 18th-century coffee houses ‘naturally were places where speech flourished’. When a man went into one, he paid an entrance fee of a penny, was told ...”