“... into ‘sixpence’ without any conscious translation. Even a single word could be macaronic: the hall screens appear in one Cambridge record as leskreneum, a French article plus an English (though perhaps French-derived) substantive with a Latin ending. The surviving record of such language mixture is inevitably a written record. We have no evidence of how ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Worship: the great Prayer Book Protest of 2000. Today, resistance is likely to come only from John Major’s little old ladies on bicycles, and from the Prayer Book Society – which may well have more members than those lobbies of fuel protesters. It was Cranmer’s intention that what was said in church should be ‘understanded of the people’. The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Perhaps it is an accident that we turn from the Miró to Kandinsky’s Weisses Kreuz in the hall beyond. With its numbers, symbols and clippings of bright colour, floating in, or hurtling towards, the infinite night, it provides a similarly compelling and disconcerting glimpse of a black world beyond or beneath our own. In any case, moving into the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the names of Rudolf Slansky, Ehrlich and Alter, Max Schachtman, Andres Nin, Amadeo Bordiga and John Dewey are, still, names with which to puncture an argument, break up a friendship, revise an article or inaugurate a new and daring small magazine. Keywords include ‘Doctors’ Plot’, ‘Deutscherite’, ‘PR Crowd’, ‘Vyshinsky’ and ...”

“... textbook, and his admiring biographies of Lord Grey of the Reform Bill, Sir Edward Grey and John Bright. And there was G.M. Young’s masterly if elusive Portrait of an Age. As Briggs gratefully and graciously acknowledges in two of the essays reprinted here, both of these patriarchs influenced him profoundly: Trevelyan by urging the links between ...”

“... supposed. It is to the history of one of the greatest of these cities, London no less, that John Morris addressed himself. Morris was a brilliant, if idiosyncratic scholar, best-known for an ambitious and highly controversial interpretation of the Age of Arthur. Londinium has been published posthumously, like Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne; unlike ...”

“... best-known Committee on Social Thought (established with family money by the economic historian John Nef), are tiny departments cutting across disciplinary specialism and empowered in certain cases to award undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. Hutchins’s Committee on the Liberal Arts was financed from the outside and was used by him to publicise his ...”

“... suggests that the phrase ‘entered the political lexicon’ in 1980 via the Lancashire Tory MP John Lee, who announced that ‘those of us who represent the regions are increasingly aware of the North-South divide, as 21st-century industry is increasingly sucked towards the South-East.’ The phrase first appeared in Hansard a few months earlier, used by ...”

“... the footnote he appended, in his 1765 edition of Shakespeare’s plays, to a passage in King John about shoes: – – – slippers, (which his nimble hasteHad falsely thrust upon contrary feet,) I know not how the commentators understand this important passage, which in Dr Warburton’s edition is marked as eminently beautiful, and, on the whole, not ...”