“... Suez had nearly wrecked, being no less successful in establishing close collaboration with the young President Kennedy than with his old wartime friend Eisenhower. He was slower to see his way in Europe. Britain fiddled around with the European Free Trade Area – something to which, despite all the evidence to the contrary, some Conservatives still think ...”

“... less likely to evoke a major response from law-enforcement agencies. Their perpetrators tend to be young, male and (more contentiously) from working-class backgrounds. It may be appropriate here to invoke the concept of a ‘surrogate racial attack’: the anonymous bogus tip-off to a social services department or an environmental health officer about ...”

“... tree, “dazzled and swept up” by these powerful tales, which made a permanent impression on the young boy.’ This account (as given by Steinbeck in later life) directly echoes Walter Scott’s reminiscence in his autobiography of how his bookish Aunt Jenny gave him a copy of Percy’s Reliques: ‘I remember well the spot where I read these volumes for the ...”

“... showcase there is a mahogany cigar-box bearing the simple inscription “The Fort”. This was Edward III’s personal humidor.’ And the visit ends: ‘I said good-bye to the shop but it didn’t answer back. Shops never do. Old man Proudhon was right: property is deaf.’ Cigar-smoking is also described as quite a simple business. You make some sort of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... haunted by the knowledge that his methods as thinker and prophet as much resembled those of Uncle Edward Ponderevo, promoter of the world-famous patent medicine Tono-Bungay, as they did those of Plato and Marx. For one thing, did he not, just like Uncle Ponderevo, construct his campaigns around slogans? And do not the slogans – ‘the competent ...”

“... a very difficult because compacted poem, evidently arose from a terrible accident to a young man. And an extraordinary poem, ‘Wanting to live in Harlem’, from Final Solutions, makes irrefutable connections between a boy growing up in St Louis, dreams of a fair black woman, two boys in Harlem, and an account – taken from the Cambridge Ancient ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it was merely an appendix to the country, the future was in the hands of the thousands of bright young men and women my colleagues and I would train. We would win, without the sherry or the Trinity Ball or the Elizabethan Society. McDowell and Webb think well of Trinity, and why not? They are so closely identified with the College that to think well of it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”