“... is not a later historian’s conceit. It appears to have been coined by the Whig MP John Hampden, grandson of the hero of resistance to Charles I’s ship money, in testimony to a committee of the House of Lords in the autumn of 1689. Hampden was exulting that, in contrast to the Cromwellian revolution of the 1640s and 1650s which his ancestor ...”

“... Johnson’s euphemism for drunk. Getting back after one party, they spent an hour in a heap on the hall floor – ‘Says a lot for the drinks Peter pours.’ On quiet evenings they enjoyed the Benny Hill Show. By the end of their lives Lord and Lady Snow had become a half-comical duo, not at home in a new world (‘the left was going all wrong on the cultural ...”

“... then further fictionalising their situation in The New Machiavelli. The editor of the Spectator, John St Loe Strachey, a pillar of the National Social Purity Crusade (no, really), foamed at the novel’s ‘poisonous and pernicious teaching’, finding it ‘in its essence depraved’ (the book, it should be said, contains no description of sexual activity ...”

“... brought out of storage after the war, they were reinstated in the north-west corner of the Front Hall, where the present gift shop stands. This was not the end of Amaravati’s vicissitudes. By the Fifties, humidity and pollution had again started to erode the marbles. They were packed away and stored in the museum’s basement in atmospherically controlled ...”

“... exhibited Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa as well as dwarfs, Eskimos and so on in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly (which was later to serve as one of London’s first cinemas). Other French paintings, including a version of David’s Coronation of Napoleon, with its dazzling profusion of documentary details, were shown separately in London in the same ...”

“... like Bolivia or Paraguay. De Gaulle said that Chile was ‘the pilot country of Latin America’. John Gunther wrote in 1967 that Chile was ‘one of the most civilised countries in the world’, and that the general line of government was ‘roughly that of the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt or even the British Labour Party’. There is not a hint of such ...”

“... New York debut in 1918. Thanks to a loan from a benefactor, he arranged a recital in the Aeolian Hall on 20 November, to play a few études and his Second Piano Sonata. The stiff action of the piano bothered him and he became anxious; his hands took a wrong turn and landed in the wrong key. He recovered by rewriting a transition in his head and pounded on ...”

“... for the wider struggle; she writes approvingly of egalitarian marriages, such as that of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, but is less interested in – perhaps even a little suspicious of – women who were sexually free or who publicly challenged gender roles. She skates over the divisions in the movement, and rather than predict possible ...”

“... by 1943. If his books now end up in charity shops alongside discarded copies of the F-Plan Diet or John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, it’s because the shimmering and peaceable ‘England’ he promised is not, after all, to be found waiting at the end of a deserted lane, or, if it were, we’d never know, because we’d be stuck in a traffic ...”

“... out that Yale had named many of its colleges after slaveholders and pro-slavery leaders, including John C. Calhoun College in 1933 and Samuel F.B. Morse College in 1961, and noted that in 1831 Yale officials had helped to block the establishment of a college for Black Americans in New Haven. They called for Yale ‘to acknowledge how it has benefited from the ...”

“... years, who is spattered with ordure in The Dunciad; ‘stage-struck priests’ like the Rev. John Home, whose Douglas gave rise to a Scottish roar from the pit: ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ There is word of parsonical whorings and slayings, of deep draughts in taverns and stews; there are all manner of clerical bruisers, men like the Revds ...”

“... really ‘the pre-Christian solar symbol associated with the magic number four’. The feast of John the Baptist was always only that of the summer solstice ‘and of pagan baptism’. Christianity, Camporesi claims, was forced on the countryside by the town, through the vicious ministries of the town’s minions, the Church hierarchy. But the brave ...”

“... with the gloss of apparent spontaneity. Working on this material with them was their producer, John Ammonds, the man who persuaded Morecambe to trust the camera, to play to it with his asides and use it as a mirror for his idiot grin. The other member of the team, their new writer Eddie Braben, was only rarely present. While Hills and Green had entered ...”

“... with a gabardine coat he picked up. Unfortunately, he ran into the owner of the coat in a pool hall a few months later, a student who had reported the theft of the coat from Nelson Cleaners and was able to identify a cigarette burn on the hem: the police had their burglar. There are a welter of coincidences and head-to-head encounters in the memoir, Braly ...”

“... days among vague miscellanies of plants. These not only have more to do with Harrods’ Floral Hall than with Central or West Africa but are kept apart from the beasts by artful sheets of plate glass. For all the stage scenery, the actual lebensraum may be not much greater than it was at Polito’s. Some zoos spend huge sums on fibreglass trees with steel ...”