“... Thomas Babington Macaulay – later Lord Macaulay, and ‘Tom’ to Catherine Hall – was the most influential of all British historians. Sales of the first two volumes of his great History of England, published in 1848, rivalled those of Scott and Dickens. The main reason for his popularity, apart from his literary style, was that he flattered the English by crediting them with a unique history of evolving ‘freedom ...”

“... by the standards of the day – was an international success, and was praised by Proust, Joyce and James; but his poetry was not much read, and he himself (or his reputation) not much liked. In France, where he lived from 1910 to 1915, he was seen as a phoney and a sponger. ‘He is a child,’ the novelist René Boylesve said; ‘he gives himself away with a ...”

“... enhanced by the controversy it generated. Some saw the story as anti-German propaganda, and the Lord Chamberlain’s office, adhering to the government’s policy of appeasement, stipulated that every ‘Heil Hitler’ should be removed from the script.Carson must have been gratified by the play’s positive reviews. But then professional misfortune struck ...”

“... The mythology of the Titanic seems to have been pretty cigar-ridden, even before the poem. Lord’s A Night to Remember reveals that the ship’s Captain allowed you in the room only if you were so still that the blue cloud didn’t move (‘firmness and urbanity’). From Ragtime we learn that the ship’s principal owner, J.P. Morgan, was portrayed ...”

“... irregular vigour of Jacobin enthusiasm suffering strange emasculation under the hands of a finical lord-chamberlain’. This would become the tone of the second generation of Romantics towards the most despised of their precursors. For Wordsworth, injured love and a sad rebuke for the loss of self-trust; for Coleridge, wonder at what might have been and pity ...”

“... between social standing and technical skill, the gentlemen and the tarpaulins, in which even Lord Howard could lay a gun, and spoke freely and by name to his ‘poor toiling and continual labouring mariner[s]’; while Drake, in a famous scene which Rodger does his best to run down, not only said, ‘I must have the gentleman to haul and draw with the ...”

“... points out that in a letter to Thackeray about his polite rejection of a poem of hers called ‘Lord Walter’s Wife’ as not suited to a family magazine like the Cornhill, Elizabeth discreetly mocked him in words very similar to those used ten years later by Josephine Butler when she led the fight against the Contagious Diseases Act. (Her triumph ensured ...”

“... what the Conservative Party is for. The pragmatism which Baldwin inherited from the great Lord Salisbury has proved a better guide for most of the ‘Conservative century’. Part of Baldwin’s achievement between the wars was surely to contain the ideologically-driven pressures of faction within his party while opportunistically waiting for the ...”

“... anything controversial. Rousseau’s case was promoted by the governor of the principality: Lord Keith, a Jacobite exile and friend of David Hume and James Boswell. Rousseau could hardly have been more fortunate in his protector. For Keith was no longer a fiery Catholic enthusiast for lost causes but a good-natured ...”

“... candidate for measurement) Fothergill says, ‘I think you must be Mr J.M. Barrie,’ to which Sir James, ‘slyly’, says: ‘You are not far wrong.’ Harold Acton, with his ‘Big Ben’ voice, presides at the last dinner of Oxford’s banned Hypocrites’ Club, which ends in much goat-like leaping about, the sort of conduct which would not have been ...”

“... Assuming the name Alice Dubois, she was trained by British intelligence and worked under Lord Cameron running a network which provided information about military emplacements and airfields. Eventually caught and sent to Siegburg prison, she led a strike in protest at having to assemble munitions parts, and died in 1918. For a while she was a French ...”

“... and occupied her life in those dimensions has been greatly extended, not least by the work of James Carley and others who have looked at the books which Anne and other members of her circle, including her brother George Boleyn, owned and, presumably, read. This makes up in some measure for what is irretrievable. Anne left no diary, few letters. We have to ...”

“... their appointment bowed to the logic that would soon be spelled out by the republican theorist James Harrington, who remarked that England could be governed only through a nobility or an army. The traditional intermediaries between the Government and the shires, the Lords Lieutenant, had succumbed to the pressures of the Puritan Revolution, and so military ...”

“... large numbers of the Indian population. Men like Alva Ixtlilxochitl, the brother of the ‘natural lord’ of the Mexican state of Texcoco, or the ‘Inca’ Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of a Spanish father and an Inca princess, wrote eloquent histories after classical models to demonstrate how much the indigenous people had done to make the Spanish conquests ...”

“... Sharon and his ministers promptly buried the report. Zertal and Eldar make clear that the settlers lord it not only over the Occupied Territories and their subject population but over the state of Israel as well. It is important to remember that the majority of Israel’s settlers are driven not by ideology but by economic and quality-of-life ...”