“... But Gascoigne reminds us that in the 18th century, as today, Anglican clergymen and Oxbridge dons held a miscellany of opinions. Under both George I and George II, the bulk of Oxonians (like the bulk of the lesser clergy) were Tory and consequendy not overly sympathetic to their masters in London. Cambridge, by contrast, was largely pro-government in this ...”

“... to have fallen on Robert Rhodes James. If so, it is an excellent decision. Meanwhile Mr David Carlton has produced a scholarly, well-written work of some five hundred pages. The author admits very fairly that it is in the nature of an interim verdict since the official records of the 1950s, including the Suez crisis, are closed under the Thirty Year ...”

“... and both sides get a very mixed verdict. There are silent reminders of what the immediate future held for Athens’ neo-imperialism and Sparta’s obstinate militarism, not to mention both states’ wartime heroes, such as Themistocles and Pausanias. Even Herodotus’ allegedly Persian constitutional debate – considered by many an anachronistic fiction ...”

“... devilish, the incarnation of cruel despotism. No publicist was more prominent, or bizarre, than David Urquhart, the crackpot Scottish agitator who sat for some years in Parliament. He developed a passion for all things Turkish (including Turkish baths, which he introduced to London), denounced Russia in apocalyptic terms, and maintained that Palmerston was ...”

“... all others. It was founded in Oxford by Edward Lean, the younger brother of the film director David Lean, and was dedicated to the reading and discussion of creative work in progress. When Lean graduated, Lewis took it over. The group was for men only. (Dorothy L. Sayers, a keen Christian and an admirer of Lewis, was excluded.) At first, meetings were ...”

“... scenery. Ordinary people kick them down and fall into one another’s arms. Everything is to be held and done in common; nobody is to be unwillingly obeyed; in the sunlight of what Robert Burns called ‘social love’, human beings return to their true nature of unselfish sharing. It’s a transfiguration first seen in the French Revolution; most recently ...”

“... founded the Memorial, became ‘the most important figure in Chesterton’s life’, according to David Baker in Ideology of Obsession: A.K. Chesterton and British Fascism. The two met when Chesterton went to interview Flower, ‘whose reign over Stratford-upon-Avon came as near absolutism as made no odds’. Flower was impressed by Chesterton’s refusal to ...”

“... his celebrants were some of America’s most esteemed foreign reporters and analysts, including David Ignatius of the Washington Post and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times. But then, on 2 October last year, the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and dismembered with a bone saw, causing outrage in the West. Even ...”

“... its failure to maintain the extraordinary industrial and scientific leadership it once attained. David Edgerton’s book, the more academic of the two, is a brilliant and often very aggressive challenge to a set of assumptions about the recent past. James Hamilton-Paterson, still one of England’s most skilled and alluring prose writers in or out of ...”

“... seriously underplaying the power of the tenants. It’s true that the dame or seigneur has held Sark as a Crown fief since Elizabeth I granted the island to Helier de Carteret in 1565, on condition that he defend it against her enemies. He divided the land into forty tenements, each with property rights in perpetuity and reciprocal duties of defence ...”

“... Since 1962, the Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by M.H. Abrams and others, had held that ‘the medieval period in English literature extends for more than 800 years’ and included Old English as well as Middle English poetry. By the late 1990s, the Norton Anthology had seen off the rival Oxford Anthology, produced by heavyweight academics ...”

“... evidence to refute Goudsmit’s accusation, confirming the conclusion already reached in David Irving’s The German Atomic Bomb, that the German physicists wanted to build a reactor, but not a bomb. Their secretly recorded comments on Hiroshima have now provided further evidence of their reluctance; Heisenberg apparently regarded it as ...”

“... instead, the debt burden is larger than ever and the programme has been renewed. No one has been held to account for this debacle. Further rounds of cuts are scheduled for 2013, without any economic rationale. Another 15,000 public sector workers have to be sacked to meet the requirements of this summer’s quarterly review; the entire staff of the Greek ...”

“... group and Hillary Clinton, the case for a straightforward National Health Bill was put by Dr David Himmelstein. As he recalls the exchange:It was evident Hillary was thinking a lot about politics. Can you realistically tell me, she asked, that there are any big powers that support ‘single payer’ and that can take on the insurance industry’s ...”

“... a man with wild red hair (looking like Léonide Massine in The Red Shoes) who brings Livesey and David Niven tea in the country house where some amateurs are rehearsing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This house seems to be set on a series of steps which, though the film was shot in the studio, relates it to Hardwick Hall and also to the dream sequences that ...”