“... the Jews spread from Old Jewry in London to Stamford, Bury St Edmunds and King’s Lynn. In Lincoln, the Jews managed to barricade themselves in the castle until the persecution subsided.The next century was, if possible, even worse. Henry III, his son Edward I and their enemy Simon de Montfort agreed on little else ...”

“... to the richest fifth of the population. Always a city of ‘Progress and Poverty’ (the title of Henry George’s bestseller of the 1880s), New York today is more polarised economically than anywhere else in the US – a fact explained in part by the decline of the labour movement. Joshua Freeman’s Working-Class New York chronicles the events from 1945 to ...”

“... to look at one of the surviving copes from the set of vestments given to Westminster Abbey by Henry VII. Anthony Symondson has written about its subsequent history in a piece in the Catholic Herald and how, via a 17th-century second-hand dealer in London and the Catholic college at St Omer, it eventually ended up at Stonyhurst. The vestments were designed ...”

“... to break up and the journey is redeemed by a vision on the eastern horizon of the towers of Lincoln Cathedral, caught in the late light of the setting sun. It’s the kind of thing that would have immensely excited me as a boy (and quite excites me now). I’ve driven up and down this road hundreds of times and never seen it before, but that’s because ...”

“... an element of danger about him. Seymour Hersh, in his biography of Kissinger, tells how Nixon and Henry decided at the outset that the way to play the Chinese was to put it about that Nixon was mad, that he might order a nuclear strike at any time: this was, after all, how the West saw the Chinese and it led to a certain exaggerated respect. It’s worth ...”

“... man of 62 who had wooed her decades earlier. Others said he was Mark Pattison, the rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, who was busy suffocating the young woman to whom he was married. The Pattisons corresponded warmly with Eliot and never admitted to the likeness. When a friend asked her directly whom she had drawn on for her desiccated, middle-aged ...”

“... may be classified according to the times and places in which they locate their homes. Some, like Henry Adams, seem to discover that far country through study and then begin to remember it as their own birthplace. Others, like David Donald and Jeffrey Hart, remember it first and then study it up in order to flesh out their memories with circumstantial ...”

“... Lennig disputes this. Largely on the basis of an interview with Joseph Henabery, who played Lincoln in The Birth of a Nation, he denies that Stroheim was an actor in either film and generally wants to minimise his association with Griffith – though later he reports that in the early 1940s, when Stroheim was acting in a stage production of Arsenic and ...”

“... the reason we succumbed to an evil ideology, but the reason it has been so difficult to do what Lincoln hoped for at Gettysburg, to rededicate ourselves to the proposition that all men are created equal and to come to an agreement about what this might mean.Ten years as against four centuries makes a big difference. Comparison is a mug’s game on this ...”

“... and furnishings within the reach of most people. Behrens was a member, as was the Belgian Henry van de Velde, who resented Muthesius’s pre-eminence by now as an arbiter of taste and attacked him for his views. So did Gropius. Like Morris’s, however, theirs was a revolution that perpetuated something of what it appeared to reject. It seems ...”

“... spent in South London and Kent, the eldest child in a family of six boys. Then in 1899 he goes to Lincoln College, Oxford, meets and marries his wife Helen, has three children in quick succession, gets to know many of the significant literary figures of the day (Edward Garnett, Rupert Brooke, Joseph Conrad, Lascelles Abercrombie, Hilaire Belloc et al) and ...”

“... sounds like the title of a novel, and the book isn’t without its literary qualities. Parsing Henry Kissinger’s memoirs, Feeney notes that he ‘presents himself as a sort of Germanic Jeeves, unflappable and long-suffering, who again and again saves the day for his maladroit employer, a malevolent, egregiously Middle American Bertie ...”

“... in politics. Political leaders became folk heroes, with nicknames like the Great Compromiser (Henry Clay), the Godlike Daniel (Daniel Webster), the Great Commoner (Bryan), the Plumed Knight (James G. Blaine) and, most popular of them all, Old Hickory (Jackson). The central event of Jackson’s eight years as president (1829-37) was his war against the ...”

“... an unreasonable question. Nixon had flirted with using nuclear weapons in conversations with Henry Kissinger during the North Vietnamese offensive of spring 1972. When Kissinger told him it ‘would just be too much’, Nixon was outraged: ‘I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.’ Kissinger soon ...”

“... were smashed at the Battle of Summit Springs. Lean Bear was killed while wearing a medal Abraham Lincoln had presented to him the year before. A Colorado unit of the Union Army committed one of the nation’s largest single massacres – 160 people – at Sand Creek.The end of the Civil War meant the Union Army could more easily concentrate its forces in ...”