“... wished to avert ‘the heavy national judgment which is hanging over us’, Thomas Clarkson said in a sermon in 1787, they would have to ‘remove the stain of the blood of Africa’. For Wilberforce, ‘establishing a trade on true commercial principles’ would be a way of making ‘reparations to Africa’. This was as far as they ...”

“... opposition to the enclosure of local common land. In 1864, a disturbing letter arrived for John Edward Dorington, lord of the manor, and his son: you are robing the working class of the Parish and their offsprings for ever in fact you are not Gentlemen but robbers and vagabonds, however if it is enclosed you shall never receive any benefit thereby as ...”

“... impressed Emperor Ferdinand III, who, despite meeting numerous foreign grandees, reportedly said that ‘I scarce ever met with an ambassador till now.’ Ferdinand added that were Roe a woman – and despite the fact that the Englishman was twice his age – he would have been smitten.In the instructions formulated for Roe’s embassy, James directed ...”

“... Ireland Bill or the Conversion of the Consolidated Debt. Wilde continued these visits, ‘as he said later, out of liking for the only house in London where he did not have to stand on his head’. In his memoir The Trembling of the Veil, Yeats remembered Wilde the married man towards the end of the 1880s: He lived in a little house at Chelsea that the ...”

“... to think of the good chicken farmers of Norfolk. And as for British consumers, they can hardly be said to be grossly exploited when you can buy a small British chicken in Aldi for £1.87 and a medium bird for £3. The president of the British Veterinary Association and the head of food policy at Which? continue to insist that chlorine-washing chickens does ...”

“... They’re not going to stop,’ Joe McCarthy said of the Communists. ‘It’s right here with us now. Unless we make sure there’s no infiltration of our government, then just as certain as you sit there, in the period of our lives you will see a Red world.’ So began the 1954 Senate hearings on subversive influence in the army ...”

“... in his lifetime than Keats, with whom he shared a publisher). Clare was discovered in 1819, when Edward Drury, a young Stamford bookseller, wrote to his cousin John Taylor, who was also a bookseller – what we would now call a publisher – and told him that he had discovered a wholly untutored genius: Your hopes of good grammar and correct verse, depend ...”

“... Ekofisk area. In 1966 the Burmah Oil vessel, Ocean Prince, found oil off Cromer but nothing was said about this (the find was anyway too small to exploit): the companies played down their activity and tried to suggest that they were doing the Government a favour by prospecting at all in such inclement waters, while the Government seems to have been naive ...”

“... to insist that those whom he criticises never held the views he imputes to them, and so never said what he denies. His use of ideal types makes it particularly easy to do the latter: he himself recognises that he has imposed a model on writers whose talk of peasants is rather looser than it becomes after his tidying-up. His critics have responded in both ...”

“... it can best be detected so.’ Seventy-four at the time, and three years from death, he probably said it to annoy the serious young dons in the serious new English departments, and he certainly succeeded. It pleased him not only to be a voice from the past, but a voice of almost youthful irresponsibility, dissent, blasphemy, iconoclasm. And it pleased him no ...”

“... loved to be photographed, he was not in the least concerned with his own image. Françoise Gilot said she couldn’t go on living with a monument, but that may have been sour grapes. No doubt he was passionately concerned with himself, but he was even more concerned with the things he made. And not with those he had made, but with whatever he happened to be ...”

“... correspondence with Queen Victoria alleged by Lord Esher in 1905 to have been destroyed by King Edward VII. Perhaps some of it was, but evidently much remains. I expressed the hope in the preface to my own book that one day ‘some wealthy foundation will finance a complete edition of the correspondence of the best letter-writer among all English ...”

“... Brideshead Revisited. It watches him struggle with madness and depression and boredom. He could be said to have died of boredom, but, like the woman in Belloc’s poem, ‘not before/Becoming an appalling bore’ himself. His war had begun, like Guy Crouchback’s in the ‘Sword of Honour’ trilogy, as a crusade against the forces of atheism and ...”

“... rage at the mistake was a motivating factor in his alleged offence. Three police officers were said to have received minor injuries; presumably he hadn’t stopped to ask them for directions. Greg Milner includes a few stories about satnav fails in Pinpoint, his lively history of satellite navigation technology – his central chapter is called ‘Death by ...”

“... Australia) to the eastern Pacific, and perhaps beyond. In 1588 Lorenzo Ferrer Maldonado sailed, or said he had sailed, from Davis Strait, north of Hudson Bay, into the fabled Strait of Anian that opened into the Pacific Ocean. These reports were later supported by Willem Schouten and Abel Tasman in the South Seas, and Juan de Fuca and Bartolomeo de Fonte in ...”