“... walking tour, leaving his clothes on the banks of the Danube to suggest that he’d drowned. (Lord Cockburn, a family friend, feared the influence of Young Werther and ‘a sudden Germanising of the noddle’.) He reappeared in Edinburgh two years later, still not cured despite the excruciating interventions of a Hungarian surgeon; eventually a French ...”

“... Lancashire cotton-spinner’). And on a few occasions we stumble on episodes that would be more at home in the Alice books or even Monty Python, such as this account of a group of London police constables between the wars: They clubbed together to buy used BBC classical records from a Shaftesbury Avenue shop. They circulated among themselves copies of the New ...”

“... palatinates, territories to which the king’s writ did not run. Instead, Castor explains, the lord of such a region ‘had the right to exercise judicial authority within its borders in the king’s name and on his behalf’. Richard was earl of Chester, and when he was at odds with Parliament he could more easily recruit men and resources from the ...”

“... ideal is the green room of the Gaiety [Theatre]’, and who, in pursuit of promotion at home, thought nothing of butchering men who were fighting to defend a ‘thousand years of freedom’. If the soldiers seemed lacking in imagination, the journalists who accompanied the expeditions more than made up for it. Bennet Burleigh, their doyen, had a ...”

“... talk constructively to the United Nations or to Alfonsin. What is peculiar about the decline at home is not that it happened at all, or even that it happened for the reasons it did, but that everyone was so transfixed by it. Hence the delay, and then on the left me farce, on the right the force, of the eventual reaction. The story is indeed awful, but ...”

“... this is that Gascoigne did not produce the blinding line or the sumptuous phrase for T.S. Eliot to home in on. No ‘bracelets of bright hair about the bone’ here. Indeed, his one poem in Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book of English Verse contains the exquisitely execrable lines ‘And popt a question for the nonce,/To beate my braynes about’. He certainly ...”

“... Here and there McWilliam does catch a glimpse of the Claimant as a more timeless figure: a modern lord of misrule, the ultimate inappropriate person. His childlike greed, his knee-jerk lusts, his refusal to be cast down, make him irresistible in a ghastly sort of way, and it is hard not to sympathise with him through all the ordeals he brought on himself. The ...”

“... of Martyrs’ John Foxe was torn between describing More the humanist poet and More the lord chancellor who brought godly reformers to trial; in the end the persecutor won out. Saint or sinner, scholar or polemicist, philosopher or politician – no single vision of More has ever commanded popular assent. When Erasmus called him ‘a man for all ...”

“... next day in Birmingham. The five were taken to Morecambe police station where Dr Frank Skuse, a Home Office forensic scientist, tested their hands for evidence of contact with explosives. Meanwhile a posse of detectives from the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad headed up the motorway to interview the suspects. In Morecambe Skuse conducted a Griess ...”

“... On 26 September​ 1849 the lord mayor of London, Sir James Duke, laid the foundation stone for the new City House of Correction at Holloway. The land had been intended for use as a burial ground for victims of the recent cholera epidemic, but the epidemic had subsided, and the anticipated dead had not arrived. ‘May God preserve the City of London/And make this place a terror to evil-doers,’ the foundation stone read ...”

“... carpets and ruined people for whom the morning was a long way down. I guess I could have gone home, but something in me wanted to stay, and so I did. When it’s over, when your youth is gone, you wonder what those times were all about, but there’s no point asking. They were about Soho and a whole lot of nonsense you’ll never hear again.There were ...”

“... becoming a land-owning capitalist class ready to collaborate with the colonial power and join the Home Guard, thus sharpening African resistance to British rule on the whetstone of class struggle; whereas Ndebele protests were articulated by compromised chiefs and soft men of substance incapable of leading an armed insurrection. Nevertheless, Ranger finds the ...”

“... change of temper may be that, whereas in 1969 he could half-hint at a coming upsurge in favour of Home Rule, he now writes in the aftermath of the abortive referendum of 1979. He extols the belief, partly inherited from the Enlightenment, which he finds in Scottish radicalism down to the 1920s: that ‘by the exercise of political will, the people hold their ...”

“... and a year later he died, aged 36. Soon afterwards, my mother went to the restaurant to bring home the Bonhomme Richard. The new owner said she could have it if she paid him what she thought it was worth. It was a trap. Newly widowed, she did not have what she knew it was worth, yet to offer less would diminish my father’s work. She tossed her head and ...”

“... Russell’s autobiography stresses that while outwardly well-behaved, he ‘found living at home only endurable at the cost of complete silence about everything that interested me’. Barbara Wootton and her childhood friends went further, and fended off the adults by evolving a private language. Only the exceptional child writes down his ...”