“... remark with which he earlier accounts for Senhouse’s avoidance of him in a letter to his cousin Mary Hutchinson: ‘There must be something tiresome about me, when seen very near at hand.’ ‘All decent people remain young for an incredible length of time and suffer accordingly,’ Strachey wrote to Senhouse in 1929: ‘It would certainly show that there ...”

“... in London were penicillin-resistant. By early 1947 the percentage had tripled. The bacteriologist Mary Barber showed that this rise was not due to the development of resistance while patients were being treated, but to the spread of a penicillin-resistant strain in the hospital. Some staphylococci had the ability to make penicillinase, a penicillin-destroying ...”

“... problem with those who, as the New Statesman soon put it, pictured Brooke as a ‘blend of General Gordon and Lord Tennyson’. To the disgust of Brooke’s Cambridge and Bloomsbury acquaintances, he promoted him as a clean-cut poet-patriot long after the sell-by date for enthusiastic lines about soldiers pouring out ‘the red/Sweet wine of youth’. ...”

“... of having good back-up at home. The wives of the 37 banded together and began to organise, with Mary Mooney as their leader. She and her husband, Mick, live in an ex-council house on the eastern edge of Liverpool, a few minutes’ walk from Kingsheath Avenue. This is where nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel was shot and killed in August 2022 by a drug ...”

“... charges; he did admire and feel loyalty to Aneurin Bevan, one of the few politicians admitted by Mary to the family home as a friend; above all, he was taking a serious and avoidable risk.This isn’t good biography, good psychohistory, good political analysis or even good journalism (‘equally’, for heavens’ sake). Elsewhere in the book Ziegler makes ...”

“... the new one (Anne Boleyn) decapitated, an indecently hasty third royal marriage, the Princess Mary and her conservative supporters neatly sidestepped. Since the King could not be directly blamed for these upsets, those who disliked them (most people?) pointed the finger at his upstart ministers, and above all at Thomas Cromwell, whose personal role in ...”

“... in Dublin in 1729, the second son of Richard, a Protestant lawyer of ‘fretful temper’, and Mary, daughter of a Catholic family from County Cork. Richard Burke was a harsh and unforgiving father, and rumours about cradle Catholicism dogged Edmund throughout his life. His was a complicated inheritance. He spoke with an Irish brogue and as a child ...”

“... material, revisits the political thought of the Puritan divine Richard Baxter. It figures in Gordon Schochet’s account of the Restoration bishop Samuel Parker, the enemy of Milton and of Marvell. It figures again in Lawrence Klein’s account of the politics and philosophy of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, the grandson of Locke’s patron, the Whig ...”

“... celebrating the canalisation of eros along those subterranean rivers of sublimation. Thus for Gordon Rattray Taylor sex in history represents ‘the warfare between the dangerous and powerful drives and the systems of taboos and inhibitions which man has erected to control them’, while for Lawrence Stone history is a geology of the glacial grinding of ...”

“... they had grown up with Charlotte and knew the unpleasant secrets of the Mews’ new home at 9 Gordon Street. By 1888 the eldest son, Henry, and the youngest daughter, Freda, were both incurably insane. Both had to be confined, Henry with his own nurse in Peckham Hospital, Freda in the Carisbrooke Mental Home on the Isle of Wight, the town which Charlotte ...”

“... have been partly shaped by his early vulnerability. After one youthful snub, from another cousin, Mary Chaworth, he avoided putting himself again into a position where he needed to trust a woman’s sincerity. (The women in his poems do not establish any hold over the heroes – who are haunted figures, but driven by some internal demon, never by the power of ...”

“... to her ‘proper station’ as an earl’s daughter. A comparison with, say, Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton reveals the slenderness of real social concern in Fanny Burney’s novels. It is only possible to see her as a ‘Jacobin’ by ignoring the evidence of her journals and letters, in which she does indeed show humanitarian concern for individual ...”

“... was delayed until February 1587, perhaps to provide a ceremonial counterpoint to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. In Elizabethan London far more people went to sermons than to the theatre. Religious literature outweighed secular by a factor of six or seven. The unique English practice of ringing changes on the church bells ‘became part of the fun of ...”

“... even as a route to socialism. His oldest brother, Bernard, became a clergyman; his oldest sister, Mary, served as a missionary in South Africa; and his brother Tom, a fervent admirer of William Morris, joined the Christian Social Union and volunteered in a boys’ home in Hoxton founded by F.D. Maurice, the pioneering Christian socialist. A high-minded ...”

“... judgments of Scottish and English historians, was he ‘two kings or one’? Wormald contrasted Gordon Donaldson’s cool assessment that, as king of Scotland, James was ‘a man of very remarkable political ability and sagacity in deciding on policy and of conspicuous tenacity in having it carried out’ with Lawrence Stone’s shrill insistence that ‘as ...”