“... and papist, then the anti-papist but Catholic supreme head of the Church in England. His son Edward VI’s violently Catholic-burning Protestantism was replaced after his death while still a child by the violently Protestant-burning Catholicism of his half-sister Mary Tudor, who died childless (though married to the Spanish Catholic Philip II, some 30 ...”

“... into conspiracy files and no shamanic visitations from crows and reeking foxes. Two ambitious young or youngish American men operating out of the same city, San Francisco, forge an alliance of mutual misunderstanding through a love of words and thirst for fame. The celebrated episode that triggered the telegram took place on 7 October 1955 in the cramped ...”

“... the story of how Merlin’s mother was visited in her convent by a being in the form of a handsome young man, who could appear and disappear at will. He is characterised, on the authority of Apuleius, as an incubus daemon, a spirit who is part-human, part-angelic (a neat compromise between two opposing views). But didn’t his fathering of Merlin contradict ...”

“... work ethic imbued in him by his Orangeman father. He lost his father’s religious framework as a young man but read avidly in theology, philosophy and self-improving literature, searching for another set of values to shape his existence. He found one in the duty of work – for its own sake, but also in order to understand the underlying order of the world ...”

“... other biographers see these warnings against worldly satisfaction as serving only to encourage the young Rossetti’s tendencies towards self-immolation. If the expected return of Christ would provide fantasy compensation for all her losses on this side of the grave, it would also tacitly justify her continuing to chalk them up. But this could be put more ...”

“... of others. Her essay ‘The Imaginary Orient’, published in 1983, was among the first to import Edward Said’s work on Orientalism into art history. Written in response to an exhibition of unapologetically Orientalist painting at the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, and the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, New York, it took aim at the curators for ruling out ...”

“... a radical disjuncture but a return to the perfection of the primitive church.Many puritans were young, rejecting convention and seeking an identity. The Hebrew scholar Henry Ainsworth spent his early twenties drifting from Norfolk to London to Ireland to Amsterdam, subsisting on boiled roots and the word of God. Even mature figures such as Robert ...”

“... lowered, post offices were built, mailboxes were attached to lamp posts and home delivery allowed young women to receive letters without visiting a space full of loungers who were up to no good. Systems didn’t always function smoothly, and dead letters piled up, providing journalists with homely material for columns. But the scale of the enterprise was ...”

“... doubled and thousands of new staff had been hired. Many of the revelations in the papers leaked by Edward Snowden (which Kerbaj refers to as ‘stolen documents’) had to do with systems brought in for the new era of mass surveillance. The general scope of the established programmes had already been revealed by the brilliant work of the investigative ...”

“... Oxbridge meritocracy recruited through provincial grammar schools. When Denis Healey encountered Edward Heath and Roy Jenkins at Balliol just before the Second World War, such was their tryst with destiny. This was in Healey’s Communist phase, which lasted until the fall of France. When the Marxist-dominated Labour Club split in 1940, he opposed Jenkins ...”

“... and energy. With such training one would not only be confident and invincible, one would remain young for ever, just as Chanel herself seemed to do, and as her clothes allowed any woman to do. Simple garments in clear shapes and subdued colours are very becoming to lined faces and ageing figures, as the masculine scheme for clothes attests. Chanel’s use ...”

“... in addition campaigned for the revived Malthusian League. At the same time, under the influence of Edward Aveling, she became excited by a romantically-tinged version of Darwinism and was among the first women to embark on a science degree at University College London. She lived round the corner from Bradlaugh, and his daughters became fellow students. But ...”

“... Radnor Parliamentarian – and Eva Figes’s source of inspiration for this volume – to her son Edward: ‘I have sent your tutor a box of dried plums, the box is directed to you; tell him it is a Lenten token.’ From Elizabeth Mackenzie, nursing in the Crimea, in 1855, to her aunt: ‘Your box has at length arrived safely and its contents are most useful ...”

“... of Western Orientalism and of Eastern Occidentalism, both of which Tagore confounded. Edward John Thompson (1886-1946) was then an educational missionary at the Wesleyan College at Bankura. He had published several volumes of verse, and was approaching proficiency in Bengali. After a brief meeting in Calcutta, Tagore invited him to visit him at ...”

“... own way and saw no reason not to have it in matters of state as well as at home. All in all the young queen had more in common with her unpopular and self-indulgent uncles George IV and William IV than the fresh-faced appearance and the famous promise to ‘be good’ suggested. Courtiers and Victoria herself recorded tearful scenes and door slamming on her ...”