“... story. He was not dependent on a large stock of factual information, ‘On Greenhow Hill’ and ‘William the Conqueror’ would appear in any list of his best stories: yet the Yorkshire background from the first came largely from talks with his father, while the scenes in the famine area for the second were derived from his one and only rail journey through ...”

“... hastily published without an index, From the House of War, a book to be classed perhaps with William Howard Russell’s My Diary North and South on the opening phases of the American Civil War, is not at all carelessly written, nor is its quality impaired by periodic observations that remind one that the author is a television man. Indeed, that seems ...”

“... men and women of exceptional courage and dignity who fought a forlorn battle in the marshes of White Russia behind the German line, and that it was a struggle for survival, for enough to eat, for warmth and shelter, for escaping the ‘hunters of men’, the Germans. In Heimat we understand what it meant to belong to an old German rural ...”

“... the control of the ‘father’ of the British bomb (the bombs of every country have fathers), William Penney. Justifying the expense and effort was not difficult. The Soviet Union blockaded Berlin in 1948, and had the bomb by 1949. The Cold War was on. It wouldn’t do to leave the Americans with the only Western deterrent. At the same time the knowledge ...”

“... 27 September, 0 14 007458 9), Nineteen Eighty-Four and All’s Well? by Tom Winnifrith and William Whitehead (Macmillan, 104 pp., £15 and £5.95, 4 April, 033 33493 0), Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (Secker, new edition, 241 pp., £7.95, 3 January, 0 436 35019 X), Nineteen-Eighty-Four by George Orwell (Penguin, new edition, 268 ...”

“... carelessly frank and ingenious way ... close-cropped, bullet-head, of fair weight, almost quite white; laughing little hazel eyes, jolly hooked nose and most definite mouth; short, short (five feet three or two at the most), swells slightly in the middle – soft, sausage-like on the whole – and ends neatly in fat little feet and hands.’ If the ...”

“... and Freud are two prime examples – while others dart from one notion to another: Voltaire and William James are two such impressive darters. Along with varying types of thinkers, there are varying modes of thought. Of these, the most obvious breakdown is between that which involves long and complex chains of reasoning, complicated analysis, and subtle ...”

“... ignorant of its institutional impact and allegiances (Beveridge, after all, only thought he was William Blake)? Isn’t this just another version of the ‘clothe-what-you’d-hide-in-rhetoric’ that Oliver’s Rosine disdains in the Labour Left? Wouldn’t bureaucracy make an altogether more serious demon than poor Aaronovitch or Tony Benn? Oliver seems ...”

“... the fruit to the British West Indies resulted in a celebrated disaster. Two years earlier, William Bligh had been given command of the small armed vessel Bounty and ordered to cram it with as many Tahitian breadfruit saplings as it could carry before sailing to the Caribbean, where they were to be grown to feed slaves. En route to Tahiti, Bligh gave ...”

“... and its inclusive culture. In recounting his memory of how welcoming his people were to early white missionaries, he writes about ‘how wholeheartedly they embraced strangers from thousands of miles away, with their different customs and beliefs’. Although he grew up in a Christian household, with regular Bible readings, he was also drawn to Igbo ...”

“... death experiences are unlikely to see a tall, bearded figure drifting towards them in a radiant white gown. Calvinists were almost impervious to demonic penetration: a paltry 11 cases were recorded in early modern Scotland, and only 25 in English Puritan or Dissenting circles. If, as Levack believes, the Salem witches were not a case of demonic ...”

“... a pale English rose: before dying, she stood ‘for one moment to her full height, naked, snow-white against the dusky mass around’. The painter Charles William Mitchell was so excited by this vision that he portrayed Hypatia leaning naked against an altar: her left arm stretches upwards – perhaps illustrating pagan ...”

“... decided to build nuclear weapons in January 1947, and to set up British Camps X, W and Y. William Penney, who had worked at Los Alamos, was chosen to direct the Atomic Weapon Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire, which was to be the British equivalent of Los Alamos and Arzamas-16; Capenhurst in Cheshire was chosen to house the uranium ...”

“... the ground was Bride Caskey, and Claffey was on top of her. He saw that Claffey’s buttocks were white, and meagre in form though energetic in action, and that the woman’s eyes were closed and that she was bleeding from her mouth. Her kerchief was pulled off her head and laid beside her, lifting in the wind; the merest inch was trapped beneath the boot of ...”

“... this awkward attack that Harsnett diverted attention back to the exorcisms conducted by the Jesuit William Weston at Denham and other places in 1585-6; various participants were tracked down to be interrogated, their depositions and a Book of Miracles kept by the priests forming the basis for Harsnett’s scornful treatise of 1603. Professor Walker makes ...”