“... He is consequently dismissive of what he calls ‘le dolorisme’, a term not yet in use among English historians, although the thing itself is all too familiar from any school textbook, television documentary or heritage museum. The constant dwelling on the awfulness, suffering and injustice of past lives, as if that were the only significant thing about ...”

“... Somewhere behind this notion lies the legendary cable Hearst is supposed to have sent to reporter Richard Harding Davis and cartoonist Frederic Remington: ‘You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.’ The line is echoed in Citizen Kane. The Cubans were already fighting for independence from the Spanish, and the US, the argument goes, liked the ...”

“... achievement, combining the restless determination of Tschiffely’s Ride with a touch of Richard Jefferies or (among recent American naturalist-travellers) Edwin Way Teale. Moon uses a camera and a tape-recorder competently, but as aides-mémoire, not as mistresses. Between these covers are locked the perceptions of a reluctant solitary, perhaps, but ...”

“... the creations of that time as the culmination of ‘a Whig-like interpretation of history’. Yet Richard Titmuss, both champion and critic of the new order, always placed the words ‘Welfare State’ in quotation-marks in case anyone should suppose that what had been achieved was the end of the story. It was Titmuss and his pupils who made the first ...”

“... on the style of even eminent critics: for example, F.R. Leavis, who praises him in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932). Having spoken cogently and authoritatively of Yeats, De la Mare and Blunden, in the chapter ‘The Situation at the End of the First World War’, he becomes almost schoolgirlish (A-level and well-taught) when he gets to Edward ...”

“... fiction – from the very beginning when the poor little rich boy is abandoned to an unsympathetic English nanny by his remote father and uncaring worldly mother. The most vivid character and best lay in the story is not the writer Louise de Vilmorin who questioned the Baron about circumcision while running her fingers through his pubic hair, but Charley ...”

“... has to dissemble to gain office then it will dissemble. It was not unreasonable to think that the English electorate disliked the Conservatives but distrusted Labour. If, therefore, labour had to pretend to utter respectability to win the electorate’s support then it must be utterly respectable, What it did in office is another matter. As it happens, I ...”

“... a certain German Prince’, containing a list of names compiled by German agents: 47,000 eminent English men and women all engaged in ‘the propagation of evils which all decent men thought had perished in Sodom and Lesbia’. All of those named in the book were ‘prevented from putting their full strength into the war by corruption and blackmail and fear ...”

“... tournaments were expensive, lurid and boastful, teeming, jostling social occasions that were, as Richard Barber put it in Edward III and the Triumph of England, part Roman triumph, part circus. The last royal tournament of 1348 was held on 14 July, in Canterbury. ‘The costumes for the entry into the city,’ Barber writes, ‘required eight pounds of ...”

“... Maurice Cowling was the English intelligentsia’s self-appointed pantomime ogre. Hamming up his villainy, he deliberately courted boos and hisses. In 1990, on the publication of the second edition of his book Mill and Liberalism (1963), he remembered with delight that one of its original reviewers had ‘obligingly’ described it as ‘“dangerous and unpleasant”, which was what it was intended to be ...”

“... why bother with him? Well, he is undoubtedly a fascinating figure in his own right; one of those English (or in his case Anglo-Irish-Scottish) upperish-class oddballs who enliven Our Island Story. For a start he looked odd: quite short (O’Toole wasn’t at all right for the part in that respect), with a disproportionately large head, which earned him the ...”

“... connection comes later: for the French, ‘maison hantée’ is a 19th-century Anglicism. In English, the ghostly connection is at least as old as Shakespeare. Richard II tells us that some kings are ‘haunted by the ghosts they have deposed.’ Ghosts then were regular revenants, resident nuisances. In James, they ...”

“... middle classes claims that East Lynne may be ‘one of the most famous unread works in the English language’. Very possibly. Yet it was spectacularly successful in its day, and its popularity has turned out to be more durable than that of most publishing sensations. Newly literate novel-readers in the mushrooming industrial cities consumed it with ...”

“... it is words that are the spring of action. (‘This tongue that runs so roundly in thy head,’ Richard II says, ‘Should run thy head from thy unreverent shoulders.’) The Crown has few pretences, and it isn’t Shakespeare, but it sets up a properly sophisticated relationship between words and actions, a relationship in which saying and not saying is ...”

“... Copland. The following year her choreography for Oklahoma! revolutionised Broadway. The composer Richard Rodgers had just left his lyricist Lorenz Hart for Oscar Hammerstein II, and the new team realised that the usual dance razzmatazz wasn’t going to be right for a show about cowboys and farmers at the turn of the century. Before Rodeo, de Mille, who was ...”