“... space for any genre, any costume and any voice. You can make it a detective thriller, like John Lawton’s Riptide, set in London in 1941, featuring Sergeant Troy of the Yard. You can make it modern picaresque, a frenetic burst of lyrical futurist imagery, like Rodney Hall’s The Day We Had Hitler Home, which is haunted by the presiding monster-to-be ...”

“... Britain. Haggard was very proud of an interview he had with a ‘Zulu of high blood’, the Rev. John Dube, who was to become the first leader of the African National Congress. Like his interviewer, Dube was bitter about the injustices which gave whites huge tracts of land and left displaced blacks as homeless squatters condemned to forced labour. The black ...”

“... had been frequented in pagan times were rededicated to Christian saints. St Winefride’s Well in North Wales attracted royal patronage and papal indulgences. St Patrick’s Purgatory was a complex of caves on an island in Lough Derg, Donegal, where the faithful could enjoy a foretaste of the terrors of hell by spending 24 hours underground; it became a ...”

“... of The Last English Poachers, written by Bob, his son Brian (also a poacher) and a ghost called John McDonald, is more punk than its predecessors’. The Robin Hood aspect is to the fore. The Toveys see themselves as the rural frontline in the class war, and their book is full of contempt for rural toffs, or ‘ya-yas’, also called ‘saddle-bumpers’ by ...”

“... Boleyn and her daughter. The uncharitable (a category that includes most English historians since John Foxe) would probably add Elizabeth’s half-sister to make up a formative trio. Bloody Mary inadvertently brought back heroism to English Protestantism after some unfortunate hiccups during and after the reign of Edward VI. Mary spent her early years as the ...”

“... at the electoral map on television tells the tale often heard in the last ten days. Gore won the North (save conservative New Hampshire), several upper Midwestern states, and the Far West, all coloured in blue on TV. Bush won the South (with Florida coloured in undecided white) and the Plains states, all coloured in red. The Bush camp complained that the ...”

“... of life.’ Barker’s precocity was impressive, and attracted the attention and patronage of John Middleton Murry, T.S. Eliot and Edwin Muir. Murry gave the 19-year-old poet two books to review for the Adelphi on the strength of some pages of diary (later worked up into the first novel) and Barker had published in New Verse, Criterion and the Listener at ...”

“... fiats and a ruling-class weapon, but as integral to the contested politics of community life. John Beattie is among the finest exponents of this more historically sensitive approach to crime and punishment. His somewhat misleadingly titled Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800 (1986) – a pioneering study of trends in crime and prosecution in Surrey ...”

“... afraid of things that may possibly happen in this country to them,’ the Los Angeles Archbishop John Cantwell observed in a letter to the Archbishop of Cincinnati in July 1933. The Hollywood Question was now a political matter. Anti-semitic stereotypes were employed by both supporters and opponents of Upton Sinclair’s campaign for Governor of ...”

“... a permanent Venetian consulate had been established there, and 150 since the third English consul, John Eldred (who sailed to Aleppo on the Tiger, like the man the witch in Macbeth plans to kill), observed that it had been described so often it was hardly worth saying anything more about it. For Ralph Fitch, in 1594, Aleppo must have seemed one of the least ...”

“... after his state seceded in 1861. Appointed military governor by Lincoln, he won plaudits in the North for denouncing secessionists as traitors and taking vigorous action against them, jailing local officials and newspaper editors. The Republican Party nominated him as Lincoln’s running mate in 1864 in the hope of attracting a large cadre of white ...”

“... died in France in 1975. By then, Harry Rée was a teacher at Woodberry Down Comprehensive in North London, back doing the job he loved best. But a little over thirty years before, they had been together in the French Resistance. Harry (‘Henri’ or ‘César’) was an agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), parachuted in by London to organise ...”

“... Her account supplements the existing European language scholarship on the Macartney saga by John Cranmer-Byng, Alain Peyrefitte, James Hevia, John Watt and others, redirecting our attention to those who did the real work of communicating.The Chinese world order (or ‘tributary system’) that Macartney sought to ...”

“... He had one illusion – France; and one disillusion – mankind, including Frenchmen.’ John Maynard Keynes’s description of the political philosophy of Georges Clemenceau, who led France through the end of the First World War, applies even more to the country’s most illustrious leader of the 20th century, Charles de Gaulle ...”

“... more likely to be found in Kensington or Chelsea than in industrial towns or the progressive North. Its leaders tended to head up women’s imperial organisations as well, and to be linked by birth and marriage to the imperial governing class. Add to this that the anti-suffragists were on average older than their opponents and much more likely to be ...”