“... 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 ...”

“... Born with a silver spoon, Malcolm Braly became a mouthpiece for the no-hopers and might-have-beens in America’s prisons. He was inside for almost twenty years and finished On the Yard (1967) in the final few months of his stretch. It was an unlikely career for a novelist, though Braly, who took a dim view of his success, never seemed surprised, certain that his fate had been forecast from the start ...”

“... provides a foil for the pronounced black which is a feature of so many of the pictures. There is no obtrusive signage, but a glance at the floor plan reveals that the rooms are devoted to different artistic movements. Turning right, we are among the Surrealists. Magritte’s sinister suburban L’Empire des lumières is on the end wall. There is a Delvaux 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he is a supersonic G.M. Trevelyan, then in another he is the thinking man’s Lord Mountbatten. No one can travel so much, do so much or write so much without attracting his detractors: the greater the achievement, the larger the target. Compared with his immediate contemporaries, Briggs’s writing lacks the combative forcefulness of G.R. Elton, the ...”

“... as a result of the Arab conquest of the sea’s eastern, southern and western shores, they could no longer do so. The economy of western Europe was reduced to ‘natural’ levels, its political and cultural centre of gravity shifted northwards into more emphatically ‘barbarian’ areas, and the result was the emergence of an unashamedly Germanic Roman ...”

“... dreamers and utopians without exciting affection. The ‘idea’ of a multiversity is that it has no conception of ‘essence’. The multiversity has a long nave with plentiful seating and many smaller circumjacent chapels. In the next decade, David Riesman and Gerald Grant continued in the same vein but added: ‘Occasionally a visionary from one of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of reading’ were ‘in a certain degree advantageous. I would put a child into a library (where no unfit books are) and let him read at his choice.’ Boswell recounts how the young Johnson alighted on a folio edition of Petrarch while hunting for some apples his younger brother, Nathaniel, had hidden on a shelf. By the time he arrived in 1728 to study at ...”

“... moral life.’ Regrettably, a few of the younger pupils were seen smirking at the back of the hall, perhaps because the book he was brandishing – by Lenin, no less – wasn’t written in English. So now he’s going to take the whole school round the back of the bike sheds, crack out the Rothmans and floor the wits ...”

“... connections that can entail. He has Westminster experience as a parliamentary researcher, but to John McDonnell; his parents were Militant activists and his politics are rooted in a Trotskyist version of Labourism, yet he has managed to force a neoliberal Labour establishment to take him seriously. His opinions would be ridiculed as those of a ...”

“... would imagine himself in the middle of a treeless field. The ripe grass rippled, though there was no wind, and the light, as he later remembered, ‘was everywhere’, though there was no sun to be seen. Seeing himself in the centre of a circle of children, all of them singing and playing ‘Ring a Ring ...”

“... angles … Because the expansion of response possibilities is quadratic, you are required to think n shots ahead, where n is a hyperbolic function limited by (roughly) your opponent’s talent and the number of shots in the rally so far. I was good at this. Tennis is somehow too weird for Max, who, in normality ...”