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“... they had adopted this course in order to let me understand that it was as well to withdraw. I took the hint, and managed to rejoin modern civilisation in the shape of the barouche kindly placed at my service by the authorities in the great outer square.’ The recognition of Kipling as a Sahib generates in the narrative the stylistic markers of cultural ...”

“... backdrops of crenellated castles, jungles, battlefields. In the pages of the magazines my mother took, I followed the lives of divas, queens and stars; one of these was the pictorial weekly Oggi, modelled on Life, but also a harbinger of Hello! in its lurid curiosity about its rich, mostly doomed subjects. The women who appeared in its pages were usually ...”

“... Henry VII’s long-lost palaces stood at Richmond and Greenwich, and at Burbage in Wiltshire, John Seymour was starting work on his expensive new house, Wolfhall. Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, like the musical Six and innumerable historical novels and films before and since, owes its popularity to the fact that ‘Tudors and Stuarts’ is still for many ...”

“... Even now, as I write the name, it has a strange resonance. In 1798 it was where ‘our side’ took a large number of Protestant men, women and children, put them in a barn and burned them to death. It does not come up in the songs, and I have no memory of my father, who was a local historian, talking or writing about it. The landscape of north ...”

“... that Mary was ‘a beauty’ with many young men to choose among. That the one she decided on, John Moore, was known only for his sense of humour and love of the theatre is puzzling at first – she has seemed so earnest – but it turns out that performance was something she too enjoyed. Pretending to be someone or something else, preferably a small ...”

“... that is the best he can do. Seven years after his father’s death, the poet and novelist John Burnside stumbled almost incidentally on the facts of his early life. Talking to his mother’s sister, he learned that the elder Burnside – ‘Tommy Dick, or George McGhee, or whatever his name was’ – had been an abandoned child, found, by whom is not ...”

“... of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the enclosure of Marske Moor in Swaledale to create a new farm, Cordilleras. The farm and most of the fields round about were named after places in South America, Valparaiso, Cotopaxi, Sierra Pedragosa and so ...”

“... been brought up by her grandparents, both of whom died before she was nineteen. She had one child, John, with her first partner; two, Robert and Shannon, with her second; and two more, Chloe and William, with her third. By the time William was born, Christine had endured beatings, depression and at least one suicide attempt. She drank heavily and abused ...”

“... Despite a new paralysis – my back –Am stirred, perhaps, to mine the new resource,Put down my worn suitcases and unpack.[Publications]Reader, should I turn another page?Fly off to somewhere, maybe even worse?Or limp serenely into middle ageAnd try to flog this flimsy book of verse? [c/o Fig Tree PocketQldAustraliaphotopies ofrelevantdocumentati ...”

“... is a long-forgotten 19th-century French economist – French no less (it wasn’t so long ago that John Kerry was derided for being ‘a bit French’). Indeed, hands up who has even heard of Frédéric Bastiat. The name, canonical and talismanic in Tea Party circles, means nothing to most British economists. Nineteenth-century France produced some eccentric ...”

“... utterly unbomblike, as was the cardboard box with the word ‘bomb’ written on it that the paper took into Windsor Castle in the back of a van. The Investigator got into Sandhurst by applying to visit the library, which is open to the public by appointment. There’s no way of knowing whether or not any security checks were run on him, since if he was ...”

“... wisdom to laymen. From about the middle of the 17th century to the end of the 19th, as Sir John Habakkuk, who thinks more kindly of the legal profession than Hogg and Godwin, shows in his massive and compelling account of English land-ownership over three hundred years, the most common of the ‘entails created’ by the lawyers was the strict ...”

“... shifts take place. He does refer to one theological factor of some historical importance. John Cotton, who left England for New England in 1633, was an experimental predestinarian on this side of the Atlantic who slipped into something very like antinomianism in America. He did so by reviving Calvin. Assurance is the essence of saving faith, and faith ...”

“... the campaign, as a series of media events contrived to produce a predetermined image. Even when John Major defiantly got out his own soap box, it was an artifact, a television prop, a designer soap box. It was a surrender to show business, a triumph of trivia, a debasement of debate. Never in the history of electoral conflict had so little been said by so ...”

“... to cash in on the popularity of Charlie Chan. Based on third-rate mystery novels churned out by John P. Marquand, the films feature an inscrutable and delicate Japanese detective/ spy called Mr Moto, a master of jujitsu. Who better to play Moto than a dumpy, tragicomic Hungarian? The director of the first film, Norman Foster, felt that Lorre was all wrong ...”