“... ships, commanded by men who even in the early 1890s, according to an Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Chatfield, ‘were still embedded in sails and all the thought that pertained to them . . . They hated engines and modern guns; the mine and the torpedo were anathema to them.’ Sea-going merchant ships had been driven by steam since the 1840s, but in the ...”

“... The High Court can order one, as it did recently on the Hillsborough disaster. Of that case Lord Judge, then lord chief justice, held that ‘it seems to us elementary that the emergence of fresh evidence which may reasonably lead to the conclusion that the substantial truth about how an individual met his death was ...”

“... have opted for third-person narration, fertile territory for Jamesian negotiations of perspective (James being the writer whose effects he most admires). A stronger sense of a social web, and of the claims of belonging, has been evident, particularly in The Spell (1998), where domestic intimacy as well as pleasure-seeking was part of what the characters wanted ...”

“... the system of justice in England? Some years earlier, in a judgment in the Birmingham Six case, Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls, had summed up the broader significance of such a reversal. If the six men win, it will mean that the police were guilty of perjury, that they were guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were involuntary and ...”

“... spot and the inquiry collapsed after less than a day – an occurrence unique in British history. James Prior, then Minister for Northern Ireland, announced that the police investigation would continue. As for the question of whether there had been a cover-up after Colin Wallace and others had drawn attention to the Kincora scandal, this would be investigated ...”

“... in medias res and tells us, for no obvious reason, that a visit to the New World by the steward of Lord Brooke cost £32 4s. 9d. A pivotal moment in Russell’s story is clearly the assemblage of the Long Parliament on 3 November 1640. Russell’s chapter on ‘The Long Parliament: The Opening Months’ begins: ‘ln the archival history of England, 3 November ...”

“... of words and things and half-grasped insights – soon after, I had the same experience with Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, chosen because of the Degas on the cover – seems to me the pattern of most readerly initiations. We aren’t drawn in by the argument, or what’s said or shown. Rather something feels right, smells right, in the colour and flavour ...”

“... Lady Longford on Queen Victoria, Sir Philip Magnus on Edward VII, Lady Donaldson on Edward VIII, James Pope-Hennessy on Queen Mary and Sir John Wheeler-Bennett on George VI. Now the wheel has come full circle, and we are back to George V again. Is there any need for this? If plain history does not repeat itself, is there any reason why royal biography ...”

“... them from the movies?’ Late in Enduring Love we hear a story about a publisher who turned down Lord of the Flies. It wasn’t called that, and it had a long first chapter which Golding then cut. The anecdote doesn’t bear any great weight, except as an instance among many in the book of what can come to be seen as error, and I don’t imagine McEwan ...”

“... missionaries, political leaders (Eyre, Joseph Sturge, William Morgan and John Angell James); major cultural figures such as Anthony Trollope, Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, all of whom took part in the public debate about the events in Jamaica; as well as officers, scribes, landowners, creolised whites, metropolitan intellectuals. Like her ...”

“... respect rather than disposable celebrity. She has contributed to some of the better documentaries: James Ellroy, Anita Ekberg, Eric Sykes, watershed BBC2, air-hostesses and desert roads, midnight fodder on Channel 4, the real lost memories. She likes to use old film, degraded archive footage, and to have it reshot on tape, fed into her slim box of ...”

“... The vessel was the bark Endeavour; the commander was the bluff, 39-year-old Yorkshireman James Cook, who was also an able astronomer. No one had thought to add natural history to the workload, but Banks got wind of the plan and thrust himself forward. He secured his place on the Endeavour by pulling strings – ...”

“... Though he spoke with an upper-class English accent, he hadn’t issued a correction when Lord Dunsany, in a review, had called him ‘an Irish sportsman’, and he had published a story in Irish Writing.Hill had moved on by the time O’Brian delivered, but his replacement, Tony Gibbs, was delighted with Master and Commander (1969). It ‘leapfrogged ...”

“... in office. For twenty years after 1846, Liberal government was kept on the road not just by Lord John Russell and Palmerston but by their two most reliable and businesslike cabinet supporters: Sir George Grey, Charles’s nephew, and Sir Charles Wood, Charles’s son-in-law. Commentators fond of political flamboyance considered both men dispensable, but ...”

“... while the capacity of modern statesmen to live up to them has undergone an exponential rise since Lord Macaulay so crisply profiled Frederick ‘the Great’. Walter Isaacson’s new study of Kissinger shows beyond doubt that he rose to power by intriguing for and against an ally, the South Vietnamese military junta, whom he had sworn to defend, and that in ...”