“... speculative capitalism that gave rise to the semi-Brutalist office and housing projects of Richard Seifert, such as the Anderston Centre in Glasgow, a half-finished and shoddily renovated sub-Barbican of monumental towers connected by walkways across a raised podium. Seifert, as Hugh Casson pointed out, had ‘loyalty to his clients’ where other ...”

“... guard at Buckingham Palace’). The translations from the French are slovenly: in a dedication an English woman should not write and an English-speaking French woman would not write, ‘To my husband, who I would love even if he were not my husband’ – Who whom? Would should? Howard Spring’s Heaven lies about us is ...”

“... Protestants. The controversy is not confined to Paris and the French, however: authors writing in English are amongst those under examination. Lloyd de Mause, for example, in his History of Childhood proclaimed in 1974 that the further you go back in time, the less love is to be found in the family, and the more brutal the treatment of children. Edward ...”

“... seem to have been both immediate and final, like the effects in his own books. In 1956 he reminded Richard Usborne, author of Clubland Heroes, of the source of a quotation. Smiling, the boy fell dead. Mr Usborne, really! I thought everyone knew Robert Browning’s poem ‘An Incident in the French Camp’. Young lieutenant comes to Napoleon with the news that ...”

“... to draw from the results. Dr McIntosh has said bluntly that it was ‘at no time’ a ‘typical English community’. Until James I started to listen to those who preached retrenchment, the Crown was an exceptionally undemanding landlord. The Crown’s inertia as a landlord is familiar, but Havering had the further peculiarity of being ancient ...”

“... step from Thucydides to Liddell Hart or G.M. Trevelyan. Howard, who wrote the first history in English of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and a brilliant volume in the official history of grand strategy in the Second World War, demonstrated long ago his mastery of military history in its classical form. But he was also an innovator. He recognised the need ...”

“... this moment is life but so was the last one. The two moments connect: Ashbery says he likes the ‘English’ spelling ‘connexions’. In ‘Drunken Americans’ the poet sees a reflection in the mirror, a man’s image                                                        fabricating itself Out of the ...”

“... do. In 1835, aged 32, he was in St Petersburg, arranging the printing of a translation of the English Bible into Chinese. (‘He boned up feverishly on Manchu,’ enthuses his other biographer, David Williams, in his schoolboyish way.) Borrow had to argue in Russian with the Tsar’s board of censors, hire and supervise ill-educated Estonian compositors ...”

“... over a third of Portugal. Catherine’s childhood, however, seems to have been cloistered. An English consul reported that she ‘hath hardly been ten times out of the palace’. She had no formal education but her mother taught her Spanish, and gave her Castilian books to read. She could also understand French and Italian.Portugal had been ruled by Spain ...”

“... a documentary realism, or a theatre of facts, that would upset the drawing-room culture of English drama. Storey had enormous success, but, for all of it, there was a psychological regress, the strong sense that he was not quite at work in the way that people who respected work should be. He had plays on Broadway and in the West End, but when he ...”

“... Religious explanations in history are all the rage – nowhere more so than in the study of the English Civil Wars. John Morrill, that panjandrum of Civil War revisionism, is reported to have advised a recent meeting of the Royal Historical Society to think of 1640-60 not as the first of Europe’s modern revolutions but as the last of its wars of ...”

“... Thompson, The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Rights of Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he argues, that we find ‘the slumbering Radicalism’ which was preserved through the 18th century, and broke out again and again in the 19th. Bunyan was born in a cottage on the edge of Elstow, a ...”

“... David Jenkins, the controversial bishop of Durham, the Scots Episcopalian bishop of Edinburgh, Richard Holloway, and the Anglican atheist Don Cupitt belong more convincingly in liberal ranks than with authentic enemies of the Enlightenment on the Christian right. We should not discount the vital progressive function performed by a learned clergy exposed to ...”

“... of the Larkin oeuvre by way of his Sapphic schoolgirl jottings and taste for mannish women. For Richard Bradford, however, it’s still 1993. ‘Left-leaning commentators’, in league with ‘academics and other members of the literary establishment’, are gunning for Larkin and Amis from all sides. With no Clive James or Martin Amis to stand up for the ...”

“... chemistry, quarrelled with leading figures and advanced slowly. His close friend, the chemist Richard Willstätter, said that Haber’s ‘early failure was complete and of long duration’. Einstein had his doctoral thesis rejected, was turned down as a teaching assistant, and complained in 1901 that he had offered himself unsuccessfully to every ...”