“... currency of account. It was a major coup for what was then a small commercial centre. There was no king’s or duke’s head on the florin. Florence had long since banned nobility from involvement in its government, which was now republican, the nine executive members elected by lot from among the patrician community every two months, so that no one person ...”

“... sort of English do you choose? Put simply, on the novel’s first page, do you want the schoolboy Charles Bovary’s trousers to be held up by braces, or do you want his pants to be held up by suspenders?’ The longing not to thin out the ecosphere of language leads to movements such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s campaign for African writers to write in African ...”

“... sought to secede from Britain, most African Americans who took up arms did so on behalf of King George III (having been promised emancipation for doing so). By contrast, in the Civil War, the overwhelming majority who took up arms fought for the United States (the Confederacy having stubbornly resisted proposals to arm slaves until the very eve of its ...”

“... pursuit of their rights, legitimately claimed. The movement’s success owed much to Martin Luther King’s strategy of non-violence, but it also had to do with the co-ordination between a ‘primary’ mass mobilisation of citizens and a skilful activist leadership, who could channel popular energy into sustained and effective campaigns, and build alliances ...”

“... her specific role in Bloomsbury, and what differentiated her from others in the group. James King’s new biography, punctilious but pedestrian, gives us an opportunity to think anew about these questions, condensing, as it does, twenty years of scholarship and research since Quentin Bell’s classic two-volume Life came out in the early Seventies. The ...”

“... groups of “minorities” ’ – the affirmative action which, he wrongly asserts, Martin Luther King Jr opposed. According to Evans, moreover, the ‘ill-judged 1965 Immigration Reform Act’ – it repealed the restrictive, ethnocentric national origins quotas of the 1924 legislation – transformed the ‘ethnic mix of the country’, as ‘the proportion ...”

“... niece), Katharine. ‘Will’ Fullerton went to Harvard in the 1880s and studied art history under Charles Eliot Norton. Santayana (who wrote him some bawdy letters) and Bernard Berenson were contemporaries. (So he touched on Wharton’s world years before he met her.) He wanted a fellowship but, to his lasting disappointment, he didn’t get one. He travelled ...”

“... Standing on the deck of the sinking Lusitania, the American theatrical manager Charles Frohman spoke his last words. ‘Why fear death?’ he was heard to say. ‘It is the most beautiful adventure in life.’ He may have been echoing J.M. Barrie, whose ‘awfully big adventure’ had only recently chimed with children of all ages ...”

“... and works rather than people. Nostalgia is the be-all-and-end-all of pop, and Morrissey is the king of all that, so when he became a star himself (and began featuring his own mug on his record sleeves) he had succeeded in creating an audience literally after his own image, a tribe inured to the modes and manners of heightened fandom. It therefore seems ...”

“... seems to end with a Phlebas-style death by water (‘Now lies he there/Tip to tip washed beneath Charles’ Wagon’), a fate presented as somewhat preferable to that of the ‘tortured’, just-married protagonist: ‘When the bridegroom smoothed his hair/There was blood upon the bed.’ The line is often taken to refer to the Eliots’ disastrous honeymoon ...”

“... at having connived at his father’s arrest for treason in Nahum Tate’s 1681 acting version of King Lear, Regan whispers to him: ‘The Grotto, Sir, within the lower Grove,/Has Privacy to suit a Mourner’s Thought.’ The next scene duly opens on ‘A Grotto’, where we find ‘Edmund and Regan amorously Seated, Listning to Musick’. But ...”

“... W e have​ the king’s own word for the massacre. He ordered it, after all. In a royal charter Ethelred recalled that ‘a decree was sent out by me, with the counsel of my leading men and magnates, to the effect that all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockles among the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination ...”

“... Charlemagne and said: ‘I have come to ask you for what no man wants, the honour of being, oh my King, if God does not forsake me, the man of whom it will be said: It was he who took Narbonne ... I will enter Narbonne and I will be its conqueror. Later, I will punish scoffers, should any remain.’ More radiant than the archangel, Charlemagne said to ...”

“... what used to be the valley of the Fleet River, which flowed into the Thames from the direction of King’s Cross. In 1863, Farringdon became one terminus in the world’s first underground railway, the Metropolitan Railway, the other being Paddington. It’s been running ever since: 142 years of complete strangers squeezed into boxes, propelled under the ...”

“... round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less perilous, I would have thought, to have a leader ...”