“... Risorgimento, like most 19th-century nationalism, had swallowed a strong dose of romanticism. The young men who donned red shirts and joined Garibaldi’s expedition in May 1860 had heads full of poetry, Classical mythology and Verdi’s music. Giuseppe Cesare Abba, 21 when he sailed with ‘The Thousand’, has left a record of his exalted state of mind not ...”

“... of political confusion caused by the Glorious Revolution; he backed the winning side, married a young widow with property of her own and settled down as a landsman. This was in 1691. By 1695 Kidd had grown tired of life on shore and he sailed for London, where he hoped to be granted the letters of marque that would allow him to take to privateering ...”

“... might in law have been allowed’. The Institutes of that Whig hero of Parliamentary liberty, Sir Edward Coke, ruled out votes for women; and radicals like John Lilburne, whose tiresomeness as a husband is enjoyably recounted by Fraser, did nothing to restore them, even though contested Parliamentary elections had become more frequent, and even though ...”

“... Institute movement, while her younger sister, an accomplished violinist, married the late Sir Edward (subsequently the first Lord) Bridges. Eventually the standard pattern of home education gave way to formal schooling. The first schools were a ‘kind of extended family unit’, often established in the home of a widow for whom the opening of a small ...”

“... itself was deadly dull. The only previous extended discussion of the Statesman’s first years was Edward Hyams’s ‘house’ history. Adrian Smith makes a fuller attempt to place the early New Statesman in its various political and intellectual contexts and relates the fortunes of the small-circulation political weekly to the seismic political changes of ...”

“... in the first half of the 18th century, as Gilmour contends. But as he also points out, Charles Edward Stuart’s attempt in 1745 to upset that regime met with minimal popular support. Indeed, the Young Pretender was resisted far more vigorously by all classes in England and in Scotland than is suggested here. Crushing ...”

“... photographs, objects and clothing relating to pregnancy from the 15th century to the present, Edward Burne-Jones’s Annunciation (1876-79) shows the Virgin receiving news of her pregnancy from the Angel Gabriel. This (the First Joyful Mystery) preoccupied me from the age of nine or ten. I may not have got my period, I may have been years from letting any ...”

“... child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex’. Her father, Edward O’Connor, was an estate agent, and she grew up in a four-storey house in Savannah, Georgia, but she seems to have chafed against the gentility of her surroundings. ‘I was born disenchanted,’ she later said. Aged ten, she wrote a book called My ...”

“... Persia’s Asia Minor satrapies that he’d initiated was taken over, and vastly expanded, by his young and inexperienced son Alexander. It is all too easy to see why the new Great King, Darius III (a cousin of Artaxerxes III and, like more than one of his predecessors, on the throne as the result of a coup), fatally underestimated the threat of the ...”

“... the butcher or the cattle.’ Why are there no counterparts to Twilight’s ethical vampire, Edward Cullen? Why are there no vegetarian zombies? (Well, undoubtedly there are some somewhere, but if so, they’ve never caught on.) Many zombies don’t merely want food, they want flesh – in the earlier films, human flesh, and lately any kind of ...”

“... upwards for the light, take what would be useful evidence of identity – leaves, fruit, flowers, young shoots – up into the inaccessible crowns. Identification in these circumstances requires skills beyond those needed to identify trees in British woodland. It breeds two overlapping kinds of expertise. One is that of the botanist who gives a name to an ...”

“... conclusion was foregone and the trial – of Socrates for inculcating unofficial ideas in the young; of the white men arraigned before an all-white Mississippi jury for the abduction and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till; of Sir Walter Raleigh for an imaginary treason – simply a public enunciation and endorsement of it. That at least is what we ...”

“... got her arrested in 1749, written in the voice of ‘one of the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber to the Young Chevalier’ (Charles Edward Stuart), Jacobitism is at most an imaginative stance from which to critique corruption, not a way of calling for regime change. Haywood even puts into the mouth of Bonnie Prince Charlie an ...”

“... throughout the book she offers a gentle but insistent qualification of the view associated with Edward Said’s Orientalism, that the fantasies of the West about the East can be reduced to the use of knowledge as power. Warner’s purpose is to engage more seriously than Said with the work of enchantment that is performed reciprocally between West and ...”

“... idiom, he was essentially a verist. In fact, his whole quarrel with the operatic stage of his young manhood, which he knew all too well from galley years as chorus master and musical director in more or less decrepit opera houses from Würzburg to Riga, was precisely that it was weighed down by convention and artifice (I’ve always loved his description ...”