“... Harold Macmillan, Harry Crookshank, Oliver Lyttelton and Bobbety Cranborne all arrived at Eton in 1906, the first two from the affluent middle class and the other two from aristocratic families. Lyttelton went on to Cambridge and the others to Oxford, but they all served in the Grenadier Guards in 1914-18, and all four entered Churchill’s cabinet during the Second World War ...”

“... a work that, according to Howe, gave rise to ‘the only literary-mythological form indigenous to North America … a microcosm of colonial imperialist history and a prophecy of our contemporary repudiation of alterity, anonymity, darkness’.And yet one wouldn’t say that Howe programmatically divides the colonists into the powerful and the ...”

“... are their descriptions of the invasion. Most of them were either embedded with the troops rolling north – Oliver Poole, David Zucchino, or Evan Wright of Rolling Stone, who wrote Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War2 – or in Baghdad waiting for the ...”

“... explained? Above all, how were they managed? A fine start in this historical quest was made for North America a few years back with James Trent’s Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States. Historians in this country, too, have been snorkelling in the archives, and the first fruits of their hunt are now presented in ...”

“... He had been a Whiteboy, one of the many bands of agrarian rebels who lurked in the mountains of north Cork and came down to raid the towns. There was a story that on one occasion in his youth he was taken and nearly ition carried on by his descendants; and a keen rider to hounds, which did not mean the family were considered to be of the gentry class: in ...”

“... when the Sunday Correspondent invited me to be its American contributor, Black, or someone with a North American accent calling himself Conrad Black, was on the telephone within hours of my being gazetted, barking that I was a disgrace to the profession and should not be employed. Indeed he made the very damaging accusation that I was ‘a mental case’. A ...”

“... The intention was to find a practical means of honouring his work. I was taken to a tiny North London council flat, and there sitting in the middle of its cramped living-room, I encountered a very ancient and frail-looking man, striking mainly for the large and antique ear-trumpet which he applied when straining to catch remarks addressed to him. I ...”

“... in 1603: Scotland perhaps illustrates the proposition that there was such a thing as a ‘North Sea economy’. At a time when waterborne trade was so conspicuously easier than land-borne trade, this is probably what should have been expected. The thought prompts the reflection that the improvements in road transport characteristic of the 17th century ...”

“... a wet Friday morning and we have come over on the hovercraft and are driving through St Omer and north to Zillebeke, a village south-east of Ypres, or, since we have now crossed the Belgian frontier, Ieper. The guidebook says there were three battles at Ypres. The first, in 1914, ended in stalemate and marked the beginning of trench warfare. The second, in ...”

“... first indication that the Telegraph is preparing to turn its attention to the Tories. First up, Oliver Letwin, who apparently claimed £2000 to install a drainage pipe under his tennis court. As the BBC’s Nick Robinson remarked, ‘the political class has lost control of this story. No one knows where it’s going.’ 11 May. To Westminster. Entire place ...”

“... Oliver Craske​ begins his biography of Ravi Shankar by telling an Indian parable. A blind man, stroking an elephant’s trunk, thinks he is holding a snake. Another blind man, running his hands along the animal’s leg, assumes he is touching a tree trunk; a third mistakes its tail for a rope. People’s response to Indian classical music is the same, Shankar told a press conference in London in 1966 ...”

“... touch and go. There was some gratifying recognition, especially in the industrial cities of the North, where Brown always found acceptance easier to come by than in London. Jesus Washing Peter’s feet, a meditative picture which fuses Christian doctrine with Brown’s idiosyncratic socialism, won a prize of £50 in Liverpool. Thomas Plint of Leeds ...”

“... produce images revised for a new political moment. Pierre Lombart issued an engraving in 1655 of Oliver Cromwell, splendid in armour on horseback. Times changed. The head was removed and replaced with Louis XIV’s; then the head was switched back to Cromwell’s, then to Charles I’s, and finally – collectors now interested in the fluctuations of ...”

“... march – swastikas flying – through a Jewish neighbourhood in Skokie, Illinois (a village just north of Chicago), where many Holocaust survivors lived. Faced with the prospect of a Nazi march, the Skokie village board had passed ordinances banning parades with military-style uniforms, banning the distribution of pamphlets promoting the hatred of any group ...”

“... notes, which are scattered, in what must often be inconvenient forms, in libraries in England and North America, is a singular accomplishment. There is no danger that Sharpe has made Drake seem less interesting than he is. How interesting is he? Sharpe is impressed not only by the extent of his commentaries, which, though far from unusual in form, may be ...”