“... the latest, and soon to be greatest, mercantile power in the world. But Tangier was too far from home for the overstretched resources of the English Crown to maintain for long, no matter how much money was poured into it. By 1680, Moroccan armies had seized three of the colony’s five forts. Four years later, it was abandoned, destroyed by the same people ...”

“... were intimidated by his habit of stabbing the wooden leg with his paper knife in order to drive home the point of the argument. His journal, a battered naval logbook, contains entries such as ‘To Clarkson’s today to buy a new disguise.’ One of his agents recalled that to approach Cumming’s office, ‘it was necessary for a visitor to climb a ...”

“... of Tesco, but not Shirley – because he was firmly of the opinion that women belonged in the home. In 1985, after her father was dead, Porter tried again for a seat on the board, citing her experience in running the council as proof that she could manage the affairs of Tesco. ‘Look, Shirley,’ Ian MacLaurin told her, ‘you’ll just have to accept ...”

“... votaries.’ The British (and the French), who had gone with the same extravagant hope, had come home empty-handed. These differences inevitably determined the kinds of settlement that evolved in the New World. The North American colonies were populated, for the most part, by small farmers who finally displaced (or massacred) rather than integrated the ...”

“... the other’.We know what Wedderburn said because he was subject to extensive surveillance by the Home Office. Spies went to the meetings on Hopkins Street, and their lengthy reports act as a supplement to Wedderburn’s written works. Printed handbills make clear that one debate was entitled ‘Can it be murder to KILL A TYRANT?’, and subtitled ‘Has a ...”

“... identities of Hindu and Muslim had hardened in Bengal earlier than in the rest of India. In 1905, Lord Curzon split the province in two: his sole object, in the view of the Liberal MP Henry Cotton, was ‘to shatter the unity and to disintegrate the feelings of solidarity which are established’ there. The decision was so unpopular, and so helpful to ...”

“... with one gun now doing the killing work of 100 riflemen, he argued, the other 99 could go home, and live in peace. (There must be a flaw there somewhere.) And then there was the argument that you get with every radically new weapon: ‘With a few hundred Gatlings on both sides,’ the Indianapolis Sentinel claimed around 1880, ‘armies would melt ...”

“... Havana); his predecessor, Pat Rabbitte; several prominent trade unionists; the historian Paul (now Lord) Bew; and many writers and journalists, including Ronan Bennett and sometime Ireland correspondents of the Guardian and the Sunday Times. It would be hard to spend even a day in Ireland reading the papers, listening to the radio and watching television ...”

“... de Navarre, later Henri IV, to abjure his controversial Calvinist faith, the French court was home to a series of extraordinarily influential women. As Kathleen Wellman shows in Queens and Mistresses of Renaissance France, these royal wives and favourites made much of their proximity to the crown, exerting their influence in diverse and far-reaching ...”

“... these accusations’ and ‘The king forgives the fox everything, and makes him the most powerful lord in all his territory’. These chapters are subdivided into sections with headings like ‘In a very tight corner, Reynard the fox not only escapes hanging, but turns the tables on all his enemies’. There’s no suspense: we know from the start that ...”

“... forms of landscape mooning alive in his colour and space. One thing the Tate retrospective brought home to me was the depth of Nash’s attachment as a young man to Blake, and to the Rossetti strain of Pre-Raphaelitism; and this helped me understand why so much from the past of the landscape tradition that might have helped him – been adaptable to ...”

“... of the year’s most notable debutantes, she is being forced to marry – wait for it – a bore, Lord Rufus Ponsonby, who is not just an earl but ‘an earl of the realm’. After that we get a bit of backstory, all about Lady Margaret being best pals with Princess Louise, Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter and an abject little snob, plus several pages about ...”

“... feel that something human, or once human, is stalking them. Relationships in the group fall apart; Lord of the Flies is referenced and hopes of a rescue fade. But the last voice in the book, Nina’s comes from a place of safety:I’d always wondered how Virginia Woolf could be so flippant about the 1918 Spanish flu in her journal, slipping it in as a joke ...”

“... imagination, and Jerusalem as a heavenly city. He proclaimed that the task of the church at home was to help modern Britons towards a better realisation of the shining city on the hill in their daily lives. As the historian Eitan Bar-Yosef has shown, few Victorians thought it necessary to visit Palestine for the sake of their spirituality. They had no ...”

“... town, or at smart country-house weekends, while the nervously delicate Molly sat resentfully at home. She had a hearing ailment, too, which got worse: ‘the deaf wife of someone who thrived on conversation and theatre-going’. Clever Hearts is an intelligent and sympathetic account of the marriage, co-written by the MacCarthys’ grandson and his ...”