“... public. The transformation of public attitudes effected by the activities of Mrs Thatcher and Sir Robert Armstrong can be estimated by contrasting the present cynicism about relationships between politicians and civil servants with, say, the absolute confidence of the generation of Hugh Gaitskell and Douglas Jay that ministers would feel no temptation to ...”

“... where Ivanov extolled the superiority of British beer over ice-cold lager. ‘He was a pleasant young man of about my own age.’ This was all James could tell me. Three years after his death in February 2000, and after several fruitless inquiries to MI5 and MI6 to find out the nature of his official duties, my brother and sister and I (thanks to the ...”

“... first professor in the country to lecture on the steam-engine, but also that he eloped with the young wife of a Captain Heaviside and cowered under a piano in a Paris hotel while Heaviside tried to thrash him with a cane. Ashton’s discussion of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge – founded in the same year as the university and by the same ...”

“... I am being unfair, for many of the essays in the volume – on the development of Parliament (Robert Blake), ‘War and Peace with Wales, Scotland and Ireland’ (Hugh Trevor-Roper), art and popular taste (Quentin Bell), the evolution of the English landscape (Richard Muir) – are excellent and briskly-written popularising surveys. But the whole ...”

“... from him. The sad thing is that in real life Mr Carter is a literary journalist of some repute. As Robert Haupt’s successor to the editorship of the Age Monthly Review, he inhabits a milieu, or space, in which the standards of plain speaking were set by the redoubtable Michael Davie, who really should get back there and sort out his errant protégés as soon ...”

“... particularly where contributors have different views of the same events. For example, Hugo Young in his essay on Mr Major writes that ‘by general consent it was he and not the Party that triumphed in April 1992’; but Ivor Crewe in his essay on the electorate argues that ‘in fact, Major’s boost to the Conservative vote was probably very ...”

“... used to describe above all the work of Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Robert Darnton (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984). Microhistorians have turned to the verbatim records of interrogations kept in the law courts of early modern Europe (or at least those parts of Europe where Roman law procedures were followed) to reconstruct the ...”

“... fields. Most of these responses have developed or refined Said’s framework in some way. Not so Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies. Irwin’s central point is that before there was Orientalism, there was Orientalism: the scholarly study of languages and texts pertaining to the Orient. The book operates on two levels. In ...”

“... substance that turns out to be calves’ lights (the gastronomic delicacy made from the lungs of young cows); statue, trolley and rails are in turn mounted on a platform bearing the inscription DUAL, followed by a bracket and two forms of an ancient Greek verb. When a carefully trained magpie activates an internal spring with its beak, the platform slowly ...”

“... a century later. The extraordinary thing is that it was more than eight years since Captain Robert Jenkins of the brig Rebecca had had his ear cut off by a notorious Spanish coastguard off Havana, the most consequential ear in history before those of Vincent van Gogh and Donald Trump. The British reaction had been tepid at first, and the country seemed ...”

“... to the power of editors. After reading Sidney Colvin’s edition of the letters of his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, he wrote: ‘One has the vague sense of omissions and truncations – one smells the thing unprinted.’ In the years after James’s death, his family in the United States was concerned about his reputation, especially about what Edel ...”

“... repeatedly in this biography, so much so that often they swap emotional valences. Here is the young writer and insurance worker reliably showing up to work every morning at 8.15; here he is getting on his best friend Brod’s nerves over whether or not to keep the window open when they share a room at a hotel (Kafka prevails); here he is at a nudist ...”

“... the editor of the Dutch-language version of Tintin magazine who coined its famous slogan, ‘for young people from 7 to 77’. There were other divides he couldn’t cross. From the age of 13, when he was moved from a secular to a religious school at the insistence of his father’s employer, he was closely tied to the institutions and networks of the ...”

“... warm yet terrifying, the sound of childbirth, I always think, as heard by the baby. When I was young, though – I dimly remember – the Cybermen did seem quite scary, with their blank, square faces and cruel, insatiable appetites for human whatever-it-was. But actually, most of that mystery came not from their appearance, but from their name. Back ...”

“... the presidency, there were several attempts to restore the family to the office. JFK’s brother Robert was assassinated after his victory in the California Democratic primary in 1968. The immediate chances of a third brother, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, were scuppered after the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969 – when a ...”