“... ills missed the point. Such complaints were tired restatements of the early 19th-century radical William Cobbett’s claim that Britain was smothered by a monstrous network of corruption, which he labelled the ‘Thing’. In the 1960s, no such powerful clique of reactionaries existed; instead, the problem was the failure of Britain’s various small centres ...”

“... to Greenland. Only Minik remained, on display to scientists and the public. He was adopted by William Wallace, a member of the Museum’s staff, and began to adapt to the new culture, learning English and going to school. Wallace and others hoped the boy could become a missionary, a teacher, perhaps even a doctor, who could return to the Arctic and bring ...”

“... England there was nothing. The absence of English Scriptures helps explain the great impact that William Tyndale’s English translations, first of the New Testament and then of substantial parts of the Old, had on the country in the 1520s and 1530s. His New Testaments, printed on the Continent, were bought up by the Bishop of London, who had them burned in ...”

“... They were consumed not only by dilettantes or libertines, like Horace Walpole, John Wilkes and James Boswell, but also by landowners, clerics and society hostesses – Hester Thrale, Samuel Johnson’s confidante, owned several jestbooks and comic miscellanies. In this context it becomes easier – though still not entirely easy – to understand the ...”

“... always to be in the right’ is the kind of morally reprehensible incident of which Henry James would have made much; he would also have made something out of Elizabeth’s being so upset that he did not come (she had cooked pheasant, John drove to the station) and, more interestingly, out of her decision to grovel rather than embarrass, and ...”

“... productions written for the occasion in a distinctly Pickwickian manner. Its members included William Godwin junior, son of the political philosopher by his second wife, whose account of the origins of Shakespeare’s genius, a poem called ‘Olympian Mulberry Leaves; or, The Offerings of the Gods to Shakespear’, is every bit as Gothic as anything ...”

“... in a riot of onomatopoeia when the song was performed as a round. Harris introduces us to William Merle, who between 1337 and 1344 kept a diary of the weather at Driby in Lincolnshire, one of the earliest such records to survive, and to Sir Gawain watching the seasons turn in the anxious year between his first meeting with the Green Knight and the ...”

“... group and, after Rockingham’s death, its successor the Foxites – followers of Charles James Fox – who, with some success, tried to monopolise the Whig label. Their main opponents, the Pittites, who followed William Pitt the Younger, are often miscategorised as Tories, though they too described themselves as ...”

“... the same subject. As well as the two Milibands, Balls and Cooper, Jacqui Smith, Ruth Kelly, James Purnell, David Cameron and William Hague all went to Oxford and read PPE. The exceptions to this rule are George Osborne (Oxford, history), Boris Johnson (Oxford, classics), Michael Gove (Oxford, English) and a few, like ...”

“... to fight for the Jacobites and be executed for treason. Not that the ICS was a much safer choice: William Wedderburn joined it in 1860 shortly after his brother and sister-in-law and their child had been killed in the Mutiny. Later in his career he responded to another Scottish ‘calling’, joining the band of radical civil servants who supported Indian ...”

“... an Ibsen campaign was started by an unlikely pair, George Bernard Shaw and the aspiring writer William Archer, who also became Ibsen’s first English translator. Shaw’s pamphlet, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, makes Ibsen into a Norwegian Shaw, intent on shocking Britain out of its Victorian wits. Shaw liked best about Ibsen what others abhorred – his ...”

“... the boundary between flesh and cloth was indeterminate. According to the Book of Job, in the King James version, we are clothed in skin and flesh; but one might equally describe early modern men and women as fleshed in clothes. ‘To be laid out upon a petticoat’ meant to have sex. When Queen Elizabeth imagined the ultimate destitution she said she might be ...”

“... political stronghold of Luo Nyanza. Many young Kenyans saw Odinga’s decision to enter President William Ruto’s ‘broad-based government’ in 2024, in exchange for Ruto’s endorsing his bid to become chair of the African Union Commission, as a betrayal. (Odinga later lost the AUC election to Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, the former foreign minister of ...”

“... a literary historian, occasionally seems to ignore the whole history of literature before Henry James, ascribing to the American postwar era various creative ‘innovations’ that actually date back hundreds of years.One example is McGurl’s discussion of ‘meta-slave narrative’, a genre illustrated by ...”

“... World War, the volatile and charismatic lawyer Edward Carson, together with his energetic deputy James Craig, mobilised Ulster Protestants of all classes to resist Home Rule. Carson, who had served as solicitor-general in Lord Salisbury’s Administration, colluded in the illegal shipment of 25,000 rifles and three million rounds of ammunition from Germany ...”