“... in the worst fears of his mother, it is only he who can ever enunciate (for once, in ‘normal’ English) the adultery of his father. Only he manages to offer any hope of comfort to his aunt, lost in apparently inconsolable grief at the recent death of her son. And in doing this he serves to call into question all our certainties about good ...”

“... on the intransigence that slowly and bitterly infects participants in long-running disputes. The English bishops appear as neither heroes nor villains, but as men whose office placed them between the hammer and anvil of a governmental system at war with itself. We see the vulnerability of the political dissident in exile when Henry II succeeds in getting ...”

“... the toad-like Mayer, he was tall and good-looking, with enthralling black eyes, so in his classy English suits and bright yellow car he could be his own leading man, the irresistible, sophisticated, cosmopolitan figure that poor boys in Lvov might dream of becoming. To complete the romantic picture, he suffered from TB. Garbo said he was a sensitive director ...”

“... ruled by what was usually the least abusive type of occupation regime, a military government. As Richard Cobb has told us, the governor, General von Falkenhausen, was happy enough in Brussels to return there in 1952 to marry his Belgian mistress. Falkenhausen’s assistant, General Reeder, who conducted day-to-day affairs, was a reasonably correct ...”

“... Rather than cataloguing the achievements of the ‘Oxbridge sporting gents’ who dominated English natural history in the 1830s, and who have subsequently preoccupied historians of 19th-century biology, Desmond excavates the ‘radical underworld’ of science, and in particular of medicine. The inhabitants of this subterranean realm constituted a ...”

“... refereeing blunders. At the same time, neither would be there without flashes of wondrously un-English brilliance from Zola and Juninho. These players – Zola for Chelsea, Juninho for Middlesbrough – have injected a new interest into our post-Gascoigne soccer scene, a new possibility of unexpectedness. Would we have loved them, though, if they had ...”

“... of the picture of schizophrenia which he presents, influenced in part by Alasdair Mac-Intyre and Richard Rorty, who themselves are transmitting a message from the hermeneutic writers Grünbaum attacks in his long introduction. His aim is to insist, without denying inherited dispositions, biochemical imbalances, and occasionally inescapable destinies, that ...”

“... vanguard of reform, many of Arran’s critics believed he was sabotaging the whole structure of English society. ARRAN HOMO was regularly painted in large red letters on walls outside his London clubs, and human excrement arrived along with the hate mail. Miss B., his secretary, opened these packages. Refusing to let Boofy see one pile, she said she had ...”

“... in his desires. He is sincere when he lectures or comforts other rulers, when he suggests to Richard Nixon that he should come to Uganda to recuperate after Watergate, when he congratulates Mrs Thatcher on her fresh, charming and attractive appearance in her victory photographs. Her election as Tory leader exercises his mind, and the fall of Mr Heath is ...”

“... artists rather flatters whoever designed it (Orbach proposes John James). The third prodigy of the English baroque, Thomas Archer, like Vanbrugh worked nearby in Dorset and Hampshire (both of which south Wiltshire might comfortably be part of). Vanbrugh is the possible author of Netherhampton House, between Salisbury and Wilton, a Venturi ‘shed’ avant la ...”

“... available Arab – by reading across a wide range of scholarship, fiction, poetry and art, mostly English and French, all of it produced in the imperial era. The threat – and the allure – of North Africa had always lain just beneath the surface. But by 1962 the Arab world was no longer under direct European control, and those dangers seemed imminent. From ...”

“... plays and novels were eventually translated into 30 languages, and he knew everyone from Richard Strauss to Walther Rathenau. He even persuaded Mussolini to reduce a friend’s prison sentence. But though he courted the famous and the powerful, he insisted on his own indifference to politics. The account in his autobiography of his experiences during ...”

“... on the subject of Fascism, The School for Dictators, and after the war achieved real fame in the English-speaking world with his first-hand account of Communism, published in Richard Crossman’s The God that Failed. He has often been compared to Orwell, and shared with Orwell a deceptively plain style (in fact, one full ...”

“... them? In the course of twenty years in the mid-19th century a group of British explorers – Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone, Samuel Baker (with his wife, Florence), Henry Morton Stanley and James Grant – slogged out on their respective expeditions through East and Central Africa, and engaged in an intense and bitter battle over ...”

“... carried out the plan made during their occupation in 1812 to lay it out in the fashion of the English landscape garden, a tasteful ruff of trees around each monument. Too many sites with their own particular abandoned qualities have been lost to the dead hand of over-zealous interpretation and expensive presentation. In 1855, ...”