“... were also obstructing legitimate trade – for example, with Elisha Peck’s United States. On the home front his policies were equally instinctive. He was a reactionary of the first order. His first speech in the House of Commons in 1796 had clearly set out his agenda: to ‘save’ the country ‘from the delusions of popular opinion’, and from the ...”

“... and Israel than God’s bald declaration of holy ground and the violating human shoe. Still, the Lord kept his part of the bargain not only by leading them out of Egypt, but by looking after their feet: ‘And I have led you forty years in the wilderness: your clothes are not waxen old upon you, and thy shoe is not waxen old upon thy foot.’ Even Lobbs of ...”

“... on who they are speaking to – from mockney when talking to clients in the cell to Little Lord Fauntleroy’s posher cousin when addressing the judge. We learn also about Carman’s pressurised working arrangements: how he would return from a heavy drinking session to begin preparing for an important cross-examination, or even call in at his house to ...”

“... the English Sprachraum it was perhaps never all that high in the first place – because of ‘The Lord Chandos Letter’, the tiny but freakishly important story of 1902, the wonderful-but-never-seen play, Der Schwierige, a swansong of passivity in the drawing-room; and, above all, the opera libretti he wrote for Richard Strauss: Elektra, Der ...”

“... scarlet macaw. According to another it is a wildcat, although I’m sure it is a German Shepherd. Lord Asriel, the heroine Lyra’s father and the liberating but power-hungry Satan of Pullman’s universe, has a terrifying snow leopard daemon called Stelmaria whose remoteness and violence evokes the excitement of revolutionary power. Mrs Coulter, Lyra’s ...”

“... military defeat. So what caused the collapses? Incompetent bureaucrats sent out from Rome, or ‘Home’, not speaking a word of the language of the people they affected to rule, was his answer, and Duggan’s stepfather was Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, so perhaps he knew what he was talking about. Arthur and Badon creep ...”

“... serving Prime Minister, and occupied the post for a longer continuous period than anyone since Lord Liverpool in the early 19th century. As a result, the volume of official paperwork impinging on her career is enormous, and much of it is still under wraps. The first and only woman to lead the Conservative Party, and the first non-royal female ever to lead ...”

“... or more candidly offered as offcuts of authorial wisdom. Either way, it doesn’t strike home with much effect because – although often unexceptionable – it lacks intellectual force and doesn’t seem hard-won. Blake is meant to be a significant presence in A Bottle in the Smoke, both as a poet and as the subject of Gilchrist’s Life, and his ...”

“... in the wrong kind of certainties. British history – declining abroad and under pressure at home – is no exception. How useful then to be reminded by these books that the study of history, like humanity itself, is chiefly valuable for its diversity. The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians edited by John Cannon is a splendid work which, even in these ...”

“... was the essential landscape of the nation for which so many had fallen, and now the tanks had come home to blast it to pieces. At the centre of this dispute stood Herbert Weld-Blundell, a man with some claims to fame as an archaeologist, explorer and big game hunter. In 1922, he was still re-assembling Lulworth, buying portraits of his forebears from London ...”

“... presses into the domain of contemporary verse have contributed), no reader could possibly feel at home within even this single subset of the literary world. Contemporary American poetry, if often dismissed as peripheral by most contemporary American readers, turns out, paradoxically, to be a far larger phenomenon than ever. In terms of the individual ...”

“... rapidly in the next two years than in the last two. So far, however, this constituency has had no home to go to. The Labour Party has alienated it, but although enough of it voted Conservative at the last election to put Mrs Thatcher in Downing Street, it is not Conservative by nature and the Conservatives are unlikely to win many votes from it in 1983 or ...”

“... last decade, and Mrs Midgley is trying to restore a sense of proportion. Sociobiology has had its home principally in the United States rather than in the land of Herbert Spencer, and Professor E.O. Wilson of Harvard, author of Sociobiology the New Synthesis, is now the leading figure in this new, or revived, philosophy of human nature. The founding father ...”

“... may help us towards the notion of irrelevance as consolation, and of metaphor as the long way home. Bird at first assumes the child will die within days, encouraged by doctors who are even more full of shame than he is. Unexpectedly, the Director’s thick eyelids reddened and he burst into a childish giggle. Bird had sensed a suspicious presence lurking ...”

“... Such medical imagery came easily to a political class confounded by two decades of dissension at home and defeat abroad. In seeking an explanation for the ills that afflicted the body politic, contemporaries looked naturally to the health of its head, the King. At the time York spoke, Henry VI’s physical and mental state had already been causing concern ...”