“... that was it.’ Understandably, given Koestler’s eminence and the attitudes of the time, Craigie took no action on the assault, and did not even tell her husband; in fact, she was to keep the secret for half a century. Craigie believed Koestler’s behaviour was of a pattern, and Cesarani agrees: ‘Koestler had beaten and raped women before; over the next ...”

“... little to say to his rare visitors and he gave no interviews of substance. As US-China relations took a new turn following Nixon’s decision to enlist Beijing’s services in the Cold War, Chiang became an irrelevance. A number of important books have been written about Nationalist China since the 1970s – among them Lloyd Eastman’s The Nationalist Era ...”

“... and they were ordered to get out of their vehicle. Soldiers were already shooting. The two of them took immediate cover behind a cement wall. The father waved to show they were there and was shot in the hand. A little later Muhammad was shot in the foot. The father now shielded his son with his own body. More bullets hit both, and the boy was killed. Doctors ...”

“... actor. Carole Lombard, who had worked with Fredric March, Charles Laughton, William Powell and John Barrymore, thought him more remarkable than any of them. On screen, his name appeared as James Stewart, and he worked hard at every detail. He was a canny businessman. Before the Second World War, he invested in a small airline. Soon after the war, taking ...”

“... the obligation of men to perform their political covenants. And it was there that the Levellers John Wildman and Maximilian Petty mounted the fundamental challenge to the constitution that would be rewarded by the abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords two years later. Even the sophisticated qualifications of modern scholarship, which have dwelled on ...”

“... reconstructed Eddystone lighthouse at Plymouth Hoe in Devon is indeed a monument to its designer, John Smeaton, arguably the first civil engineer in the modern sense, but it does not ‘host’ his remains. Smeaton was an eminently practical man who would have thought such an idea outlandish. When he died in 1792, he was respectably buried in his parish ...”

“... his wife by his conversions and unconversions and reconversions to and from the Catholic faith. He took small interest in the upbringing of his oldest and most unruly daughter – ‘A child more obstinately self-willed I certainly never came across’ – and Mary was exiled from the family in a succession of more or less unhappy boarding-schools. She was ...”

“... of birth control. Her books were all grist to Constant’s radical mill, and he gleefully took on Bottom Dogs by the American writer Edward Dahlberg: a book so shocking that it was published in a limited edition of 500 copies with gilt tops at 15 shillings – double the normal price of novels. But when Arnold Bennett, then at the height of his fame ...”

“... rather than later. These tactical differences, however, subsumed a common strategic aim. We all took it for granted that a breakaway from the Labour Party was a precondition of a successful social democratic party: and we took that for granted because we also took it for granted that it ...”

“... It was very unfair to those young men.’ John Henry Newman’s conversion to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 shattered the intellectual credit of the Oxford Movement. The long struggle – first from the pulpit of the University Church of St Mary, later through the radical pages of Tracts for the Times – to state the case for the Apostolic authority of the Anglican church had ended, as the Movement’s critics had always predicted, in total surrender to Catholic dogma ...”

“... Obama’s promise to withdraw ‘one to two’ combat brigades a month for 16 months. Suddenly, John McCain’s belief that US troops should stay until some undefined victory looked impractical and out of date. The Iraqi government seemed almost surprised by its own decisiveness. It is by no means as confident as it pretends to be that it can survive ...”

“... chronicles with an uncharacteristic lack of curiosity the hesitancy of the Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, to strike quickly and hard at the BUF. He records a paper submitted by Anderson to Cabinet a few days before regulation 18B was made, arguing that drastic action was premature, and he quotes the Cabinet minute of the ensuing discussion, which ...”

“... links’. These were discussed in various forms by Hume, both James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill, Bain, and most effectively by Hartley. As Jeffrey Gray points out, a major impact of Pavlov’s work was to bring experiments to bear on philosophical notions of mind, rather as the great physicists have, over a much longer ...”

“... exceptional wit and charisma, who brought the most powerful man in the country to his knees: as John Guy and Julia Fox describe her, ‘the confident, highly articulate woman with the dark flashing eyes’. It was the tempestuous love between Henry VIII and Anne, it’s said, that managed to topple papal power in England, and turn the country from Catholic ...”

“... the first to demand a widespread franchise, were confined to a small circle. The few scholars who took the Levellers seriously – G.P. Gooch, say, or the American Theodore Pease – restricted themselves to short sections on the Putney Debates. In 1938, a new edition of the debates was published by A.S.P. Woodhouse, with a foreword by the radical Oxford ...”