“... the fundholders who had financed the war. Taxpayers suffered badly in the post-war depression, and William Cobbett led a bitter national protest at the stockholding leeches who, he claimed, were sucking the lifeblood from John Bull. At times of economic tension over the following twenty years, the fundholder and the landowner competed to be the most vilified ...”

“... demand forced Smith’s to lift their blockade on his works. It even earned him a postcard from Gladstone, congratulating him on the book’s high moral tone. A touch shamefacedly, perhaps, the author told Havelock Ellis that ‘he had not made any overt attempt to do good in writing Esther Waters, but was gratified to think that inadvertently the book ...”

“... No bond was more important to him, or longer-lasting, than the friendship he forged with William Morris at Oxford. Morris, too, had flirted with the Church – much wealthier than his friend, he once contemplated using his inheritance to finance a monastery – but by the time they left university ‘we were both settling in our minds,’ as ...”

“... are mentioned, including Henry II and Becket, Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, Charles II and William III, Nelson and Wellington, Gladstone and Disraeli. In addition to the three British courses, students have to take one period of European history before 1914, and two world history courses, one involving an ancient ...”

“... little of their time, and fewer of their resources, on doing good works. From Edward II until William and Mary, they presented maundy money to a handful of deserving indigents once each year; and from the Normans until the early Georges, largesse was distributed to the poor at royal pageants and progresses. Even adding occasional personal gifts, and the ...”

“... created; and from which there is no going back. More than any other British prime minister, even Gladstone, she conforms to Max Weber’s type of the modern demagogic politician: the leader who appeals directly to the electorate over the heads of the party machine; and who subordinates the machine to his or her political personality. In the end, the machine ...”

“... coast of Ireland with a substantial French force. He had fled England a few months before when William and Mary had been declared joint sovereigns – the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’. In April, the House of Commons responded by voting for war with France. Initially, that war, which would continue intermittently for much of the next century, was ...”

“... the ‘public career’ with which Robert Stewart’s book is concerned ended in the reign of William IV: but Brougham – who, if he had indeed been decapitated, would surely have walked and above all talked for long enough after the event – lived on until Victoria had reigned for over thirty years. When he died at last in 1868, the Daily Telegraph ...”

“... gods were to remain the same all his life – Hampden, Swift, Hazlitt, Cobden, Bright, Mill, Gladstone, Wilberforce and Charles James Fox. There was, in time, one great socialist addition to the pantheon, Aneurin Bevan. It followed that politics was mainly about two things: standing up for moral principle and making wonderful speeches. Any idea that it ...”

“... Yeats’s nationalist ideology is sometimes feverish and emotional – as when he is introduced to William Sharp and hates ‘his red British face of flaccid contentment’ – though he is capable of tolerantly describing his Oxford landlady as ‘a good woman with a pale ungenial English face’. As his devoted editors point out, Yeats identified with the ...”

“... phase are situated in Cambridge, Otago, Keele, London, Middlesex and Cardiff. The doyen of them, William Cornish, has a distinguished record both as a legal historian – his and Geoffrey Clark’s Law and Society in England 1750-1950 remains an important work – and as an authority on intellectual property, on which he contributes an excellent section ...”

“... God’s work in this life. Radkau and others suggest that Weber would also have been affected by William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, which also appeared in 1902, not least by James’s suggestion that ‘the real core of the religious problem’ lies in a cry for help. The two men met in Boston in 1904, in the course of what for Weber was an ...”

“... Rule Party. Its early allies at Westminster were the Conservative Party and Liberal opponents of Gladstone; its allies at home were the sectarian Orange Order, and the Protestant landowning, professional and business fraternities. In the years before the outbreak of the First World War, the volatile and charismatic lawyer Edward Carson, together with his ...”

“... book, marred only by poor indexing, the most surprising example of which is the confusion of W.E. Gladstone with his son Herbert. The book covers a long span – from the 17th century to April 2004 – and is based on a remarkable array of sources. Every form of commercial gambling is covered: cards, horses, dogs, football pools, lotteries, gaming ...”