“... most women of her milieu, she was taught some Chinese and Buddhist classics, and these she was said to have learned much more quickly than her brother, who was being trained for a political career. This made her father lament the fact that she was not a man. After a few years of marriage she became a widow, and then served as court lady to the Empress. Her ...”

“... had forfeited that blessing.’ This took some nerve. Baxter remarks that he had thoughtfully said ‘monarchy’ rather than ‘King Charles’ for prudential reasons: ‘I was fain to speak of the species of government only, for they had lately made it treason by a law to speak for the person of the king.’ Really, C.H. Sisson ought to have appreciated ...”

“... pacifists (‘put the lot behind barbed wire’), bureaucrats, brass hats and blimps. In 1940 Edward Hulton, the proprietor of Picture Post, said that Cudlipp was an uncomfortable sort of young man to meet. He is a revolutionary. I don’t mean he is filled up with a stock of ballyhoo about Karl Marx, or that he ...”

“... rumour at Louth in October 1536 were duly enforced in the reigns of Henry VIII’s children Edward and Elizabeth. So much for the events. But it is the interpretation of the events which has generated a small shelf’s worth of books and articles on the subject of the Pilgrimage of Grace, of which Hoyle’s is only the latest, if the most ...”

“... ten minutes or so – or when you are going to trace an outline, to obtain the assistance of the said Prince … to hold up your tracing to the wall … it is very polite … but rather embarrassing.’ Albert couldn’t win. He was either a parasite or he interfered. When things went wrong he was blamed and Victoria was not unjustified in feeling that he ...”

“... only to be brought down by his political opponents on a charge of corruption. It used to be said that there was no connection between Bacon’s intellectual life and his public career. Macaulay set the pattern for this interpretation in an essay of 1837, in which he praised Bacon’s philosophy as forward-looking, but condemned his moral character and ...”

“... by Henry Mortlock, whose success was founded on multiple editions year after year of the works of Edward Stillingfleet, beginning in 1661 with his Irenicum, which attacked Nonconformism as entirely without justification. As Stillingfleet rose through the established Church eventually to become Bishop of Worcester, Mortlock rose with him to become Master of ...”

“... and it goes places and it will never, I promise you, get stuck in the mud’) and reveals that Edward Heath was probably the first leader of his party to have fitted carpets. White Heat contains a comprehensive collection of George Brown stories, although the best one remains the incident when the worse-for-wear foreign secretary was rejected by a ...”

“... proven reality. It’s just silliness among the signifiers. Stevenson’s book is, it should be said in fairness, a massive gathering of painful erudition. He is like Denys the Alexandrian, who in Flaubert’s account received orders from heaven to read every book in the world. His head must be dizzy with the minor works of Julian Mitchell and Francis King ...”

“... and what he is reading and wants to read. Yeats and Rilke dominate the talk of poetry. Edward Thomas, the figure behind the best poems in Raiders’ Dawn, is not mentioned. Lewis asks: ‘Will you copy for me Yeats’s poem “Solomon and the Witch” from the red Weekend Book … When I found it on the last morning I realised how much I needed ...”

“... chaotic phenomenon is a poor model for the kinds of strategic intervention she advocates. Edward Lorenz, the originator of the butterfly trope, wasn’t asking us to imagine a remarkably clever insect calculating exactly how and when to flap its wings in such a way as to produce a storm in, say, Ipswich. The butterfly neither controls nor knows the ...”

“... hands are always the same. The second comes during ‘Molasses to Rum’, chillingly delivered by Edward Rutledge, the delegate from South Carolina who will not vote for independence until an anti-slavery clause is removed from the declaration. He leaps up on a table and becomes the auctioneer, the room goes red like something laid open, and this is the ...”

“... One of his teachers, trying to explain what Wordsworth meant when he spoke of ‘trances’, is said to have referred him to Ramakrishna, a yogi at a nearby temple. In fact, curiosity about Ramakrishna was already widespread by the time of their first encounter in 1881. Even if the story is untrue, it captures Ramakrishna’s allure as a romantic rebel. A ...”

“... until at least the tenth century. The victory of Imam Asim over the local Buddhist regime is said to have taken place in the 12th century, but the distinctive forms of Islamic governance in the region can be dated to the arrival of Sufis of the Naqshbandi order in the late 14th or early 15th century. A combined system of temporal and spiritual power ...”

“... doubled and thousands of new staff had been hired. Many of the revelations in the papers leaked by Edward Snowden (which Kerbaj refers to as ‘stolen documents’) had to do with systems brought in for the new era of mass surveillance. The general scope of the established programmes had already been revealed by the brilliant work of the investigative ...”