“... for the reader: I was also visited by wonderful dreams about flying which I later learned are said to be an indication of sexual desire. Whether or not this is true, the dreams were deliciously exciting, though having to stay airborne required much concentration … I’m regretful that I no longer have these dreams. Vague erotic fantasies, undirected to ...”

“... has the younger generation of royals exactly endeared itself to the national headmistress. Prince Edward has never recovered from the fiasco of It’s a Knockout, Fergie’s foray into fiction was equally ill-advised, and if Marina Ogilvy had not existed, the tabloids would probably have invented her (which to some extent they undoubtedly did). Even the ...”

“... captives Venus, which of course had no meaning in the village from which she had been taken, but said plenty about their expectations, intentions and transgressions. 'Abolition of the Slave Trade' by Isaac Cruikshank (1792) Cruikshank based his drawing on a story told by William Wilberforce in a speech delivered in the House of Commons a week earlier, in ...”

“... whose work has not worn well. ‘I think one ought to be downright cruel to him,’ D.H. Lawrence said, and many have been. Max Beerbohm was, when at a dinner party he asked Davies, ‘How long is it since Shaw discovered you?’; on being told it was 13 or 14 years, he replied, ‘Oh dear dear – and has it been going on all this time?’ and added that ...”

“... had already proved impossible: in 1553, the last year of the reign of Elizabeth’s brother, Edward VI, an English expedition had tried to sail to China round the north of Russia. Most of the sailors froze to death near present-day Murmansk, but some of them made it to Moscow, where they struck a trade deal with Ivan the Terrible – nearly as good as a ...”

“... by W.T. Stead, in a compartment by itself. It exemplified the New Journalism which, according to Edward Dicey, then editor of the Observer, catered to consumers who ‘liked to have their mental food given them in minces and snippets, not in chops and joints’. As Curtis demonstrates, Law and Order reports increased newspaper sales. After the Chapman ...”

“... proved an unignorable source for current work, in the way that Heidegger and Wittgenstein have. Edward Skidelsky sees a recent positive shift in the winds of his reputation, but he is suspicious of the reasons for it. The very idealism and liberalism that make Cassirer seem to so many such an anachronism also render him newly appealing as the apostle of a ...”

“... History Plays in 1944. They are highly dissimilar books, partly because Tillyard was, as he said, ‘no historian’ and because Lake is, as he says, ‘not a literary critic’, but also because of a long revolution of interpretative perspective. Tillyard set the revolution in train but it eventually displaced his thesis, and to Lake he seems a remote ...”

“... of lies and monstrous brutality,’ but that as Cromwell’s man he is complicit.It has been said that successful detective fiction is a quarter plot, a quarter character, and half what the writer knows. Sansom knows Tudor England well. The facts never impede the story, and rarely clunk as they’re dropped in. He makes historical details earn their ...”

“... string of politicians, including Herbert Asquith, Harold Macmillan, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins and Edward Heath.Murray’s family may not have been Balliol men (he was the third generation of his family to study across the road at Exeter College), but their scholarly and civil service genealogy conforms to its ethos, and Murray hints at a close connection with ...”

“... a dubious decorum. What was their relationship like? In a telling family memoir from 1867, James Edward Austen-Leigh, Austen’s nephew, described it thus: Their sisterly affection for each other could scarcely be exceeded. Perhaps it began on Jane’s side with a feeling of deference natural to a loving child towards a kind elder sister. Something of this ...”

“... medium for these continual transactions of inner and outer was her vital irony. When Jane Austen said that she depended on her readers’ ingenuity, she meant something not far from Shakespeare’s ‘Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.’ Virginia Woolf meant kindly when she wished that her predecessor as female artist had lived longer and seen ...”

“... American readers is ‘whingeing’. Yet he has been in some ways unlucky. Born in 1948, sometimes said to be the most fortunate year of the 20th century, he is one of the baby-boomers who grew up with the National Health Service, free milk and orange juice, student grants and proper occupational pensions, none of which was of any use to him. Instead he bumped ...”

“... Tory Party and all the leading participants are obliged to state and restate what they said and did then in much the same way that the members of an earlier Tory generation had to spell out the position they’d taken over Munich. And just as Chamberlain’s deal at Munich was immensely popular for a short time and then reviled, so the conventional ...”

“... on the dead weight of resistance at all levels of society. John Cook, Charles I’s prosecutor, said that ‘we would have enfranchised the people, if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom.’ William Sedgwick told the generals that ‘not one of a hundred will own what you set down as the public interest ... should you not rather ...”