“... formalised by the Washington agreements in the Twenties. The Empire (meaning really the White Dominions) was never primarily a power base: it was an anglophone cultural community, which, most importantly, could not exclude the United States. The Colonies and Dominions (as well as the US) were free to levy tariffs against Britain while, in ...”

“... I to Henrietta Maria. In a recent essay (published in Past and Present, November 1983) Peter White has thrown the Tyacke thesis into question. He contends (as H.C. Porter has long done) that the pre-Laudian Church was never narrowly Calvinist. Yet at least White and Tyacke can find common ground in their emphasis on ...”

“... works the possibilities of dialogue literally translated from the French, and of a Southern poor-white narrative style: ‘There’s this European painter that paints people with big holes in them, holes as big as windows where you see the clear blue sky and white clouds through their thoracic regions, though Marl ...”

“... picnic’ – was infuriating. The oba is reported to have said that ‘while the Great White Queen was ruler of the seas, he was ruler of the land.’ A year before the invasion, one of the Royal Niger Company’s officials urged the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce to prevail on the government to have him ‘deposed or transported elsewhere’. Such ...”

“... Pinocchio that it is Collodi’s original that has come to seem like the revised version. As Richard Wunderlich and Thomas Morrissey write in their study of Pinocchio in America, ‘Pinocchio’ Goes Postmodern (2002), Collodi’s novel is now merely a ‘version among versions’: an adult version in their view, unsuitable for children, because no ...”

“... allowed the pope to hire and fire his English bishops and give their dioceses English placenames. Richard II’s prime aim in the Great Praemunire Statute of 1392 was to prevent the pope and his favoured cardinals from taking juicy revenues out of England. British membership of the EU has, per contra, attracted billions of foreign capital to Britain, while ...”

“... former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was edited by Richard Crossman and the Congress distributed it. Carefully negotiating my way through a maze of booksellers’ wares laid out on the pavement alongside Ezbekieh Gardens in Cairo in late 1957, I was brought up short by a large pile of TGTFs stacked in front of ...”

“... was nothing like the one he tarted up for his memoirs. Brussel’s real advice was to search White Plains, New York for an egomaniacal German high-school graduate in his forties with a facial scar; an expert in bomb-making; a man who had ‘a classic textbook case of paranoia’, rather than a genuine beef. Whoops. The evidence which led to the capture ...”

“... and self-discipline, and a deep hatred of the United States and the Western way of life. As Richard Hofstader and others have argued, for more than two hundred years this kind of combination has always acted as a prompt for paranoid and reactionary conspiracy theories, most of them groundless. Now the threat is real; and for the foreseeable future we ...”

“... was far greater than Bill Clinton’s (Dallek found that Kennedy, too, had an affair with a White House intern), but he had the good fortune not to be found out – Bobby had some delicate negotiations with J. Edgar Hoover. Kennedy essentially didn’t care much about women; he enjoyed the chase more than the conquest, and, according to other ...”

“... man in a hat and suit rolls by behind them; a smart gentleman with a cane silhouetted against a white circle painted on a fence, as if in the final diminishing frame of a silent movie; a group of children clambering around rubble, one of them almost seeming to burst out of the photograph itself. A year later he went to Mexico, where he hung out with ...”

“... cohesion. Classes consolidate, whites push down on blacks, blue collars are hemmed in by white collars, and grey flannel suits march down city streets lined with offices and banks. Auschwitz may have been a world away from Levittown, but in Hannah Arendt’s vision of totalitarianism – ‘destroying all space between men and pressing men against ...”

“... so archaic, so self-confounding, so remote from the basic American consensus, ever got so far?’ Richard Hofstadter asked. Graffiti artists shared the intelligentsia’s disdain and defaced Goldwater’s campaign billboards, appending the word ‘Wing’ to his slogan ‘In Your Heart You Know He’s Right.’ Others added the coda: ‘In Your Guts You Know ...”

“... not a talker’ (a phrase with an interesting provenance – it goes back to the First Murderer in Richard III, by way of Bob Dole in his failed bid for the presidency in 1996). But it’s a line that unwittingly draws attention to the intellectual as well as the rhetorical limits of her candidacy. ‘We can get back on the path we were on,’ she ...”

“... of adoration and welcome which lay people were expected to adopt at this point in the Mass (Richard II adopts the same posture in the Wilton Diptych). But both Charles Martel and the painting’s viewer are distracted by the appearance of an angel, who descends from the top of the frame towards the altar, holding a letter of absolution for the secret ...”