“... and that ‘learning destroyed femininity.’ As a result, some of the more intelligent are said to have bribed their brothers by performing various small services in exchange for the loan of school books. In a minority of homes, Dyhouse admits, different standards prevailed, but not necessarily with happier results, as I can testify. Both my parents ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it is shift for yourself.’ Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the myopic boy who grew up during that trip, said of Scott that he never met a man who cried so easily; later, in The Worst Journey in the World, he wrote, with stunning clarity: ‘I now see very plainly that though we achieved a first-rate tragedy, which will never be forgotten just because it was a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... job to another. An alternative version of him appears in Offshore, written after his death, in Edward, the husband whom his wife Nenna loves but cannot manage, somehow, to live with. ‘And now the quarrel was under its own impetus . . . And the marriage that was being described was different from the one they had known . . . and there was no one to ...”

“... Queen of Romania, Queen Victoria’s third son, the Duke of Connaught, and less frequently King Edward VII. Rose quotes one of Nancy’s ‘most celebrated bons mots’: when invited by the King to play bridge, she is said to have refrained with the claim: ‘Why I don’t even know the difference between a King and a ...”

“... might be there, though, taking a few notes in the corner. Not without a moral struggle, Stevenson said yes. The partnership would last until Lloyd George’s death 32 years later. Stevenson acted as his private secretary through the second half of his chancellorship, his periods at the Ministry of Munitions and the War Office, his six years as prime ...”

“... must be prepared to take seriously premodern other-worldliness, to grapple with what St Augustine said about grace at the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries, and how Augustine was reinterpreted in the 16th century, most crucially by Luther, and in 17th-century France by Jansenists, who as hyper-Augustinians believed in a high doctrine of ...”

“... of men on the ground. Two platoons were suggested or even less or a military field hospital. Bundy said that the result of such a contribution would be worth “several hundred million dollars”.’ While this offer seems to have been withdrawn, for fear of alienating Wilson, US memoranda make clear that it represents the thinking of the Johnson ...”

“... chimerical. It had no bearing on culture, intelligence or any of the multitude of things it was said to determine; nor were the so-called races hierarchically organised.By the 1930s Boas was using scare quotes around the word ‘race’: it was, he said, ‘at best a poetic and dangerous fiction’. He was continually ...”

“... involving 184,000 members of the National Union of Mineworkers and their families. It is usually said to have begun in early March 1984 when miners walked out of Cortonwood colliery in South Yorkshire after it was announced that the pit was to be closed along with nineteen others across Britain. Arthur Scargill, the leader of the NUM, decided to use the ...”

“... I meant nothing by the lighthouse,’ Virginia Woolf said of the novel she published in 1927. ‘I trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions.’ To the Lighthouse, her fifth novel, outsold the previous four and readers have been depositing or discovering their emotions in it ever since ...”

“... never do much harm among those who had not three shillings to spare,’ Pitt is reported to have said. The men who had most to gain from the idea that subjects should judge the value of political institutions for themselves would never be able to afford Godwin’s book.If the Enquiry concerning Political Justice didn’t count as sedition, what did? When the ...”

“... right simile here, because sometimes he was lunching judges) and tried to remember everything they said. Taking notes was out of the question: ‘nothing would be more likely to cause an informant to clam up.’ He was happy to be recognised as ‘the Lone Wolf of Fleet Street’ and to spurn friendship with colleagues and rivals. His personality had a ...”

“... in pretending to help people capture Robin Hood. He is the only figure in the DNB who is said never to have existed. Stephen Knight grants that ‘it seems highly improbable, or at least unprovable, that a Mr R. Hood ever existed,’ though, for some people, Robin Hood, King Arthur ‘and even God himself all existed because of their manifold ...”