“... abandon, but it was only after the publication of the sixth – which equated the heraldic white horse of Hanover with the ‘pale horse’ of Death in the Book of Revelation – that he was prosecuted.Under​ the Treason Act of 1351, which set the punishment for high treason as hanging, drawing and quartering, a person could be found guilty not only ...”

“... his political judgments are not easily separated from his aesthetic and moral ones. Reading John Stuart Mill made him think about the ‘conglomerated mediocrity’ that surrounded him in Britain: ‘the narrowing of men’s minds and energies’, ‘the constant increasing superficiality of life’, and of ‘general human interests’ being ‘reduced to ...”

“... the conduct of long-term epistolary friendships, from the awkwardness of early attempts (with Hugh Stuart Boyd, for example) to the confident intimacy of her letters to Mary Russell Mitford. These letters display her wit, her self-awareness, and her fine descriptive eye, as well as her sudden plunges into fervent feeling. In May 1843 she gave a graphic and ...”

“... years ago the task would have been easier. Leading historians supposed that the occupants of early Stuart England had missed what posterity could discern: a process of polarisation, of which the war, when it came, was a perhaps inevitable expression. On that view, fundamental and inflammatory social conflicts demanded resolution. They set the court and ...”

“... from the Greek by Hugh Goldie (1815-95), Edinburgh, 1862; Saint Luke in Dinka (spoken on the White Nile), translated by the Roman Catholic Central African Mission, Brixen, 1866, a rare instance of a Catholic translation in a profession dominated by Protestants; Ruth and Jonah in Southern Swahili (spoken in the region of Zanzibar), translated by Edward ...”

“... and historical canon largely involved the insertion, repudiation or reordering of a cast of dead white males. Since then, there have been efforts to expand disciplinary canons to incorporate more women and greater racial and ethnic diversity. At first glance, the inclusion of Catharine Macaulay’s writings in the influential Cambridge Texts in the History ...”

“... seeing, confesses to a similar sluggishness of feeling: Twenty-some years ago, I read Graham Stuart Thomas’s ‘Colour in the Winter Garden’. I didn’t plant a winter garden, but the book led on to his rose books: ‘The Old Shrub Roses’, ‘Shrub Roses of Today’, and the one about climbers and ramblers. (‘Horse-Chestnut Trees and ...”

“... were so many Saturday evening light entertainment shows with sleazy male comedians, groups of white male singers in blackface, teams of young women in uncomfortable outfits kicking like horses trained to do dressage. At the time I had no words for the wretched feelings such programmes gave me, but looking back on it ‘WE’RE NOT BEAUTIFUL, WE’RE NOT ...”

“... and self-interest. Because it benefits everyone – ‘the most vital of all interests’, John Stuart Mill called it, which no one can ‘possibly do without’ – it is immune to politics. Yet, as Arnold Wolfers wrote years ago, security is an ‘ambiguous symbol’, which ‘may not have any precise meaning at all’. It allows political leaders to ...”

“... twice, first Donald Ferguson with whom she spent two years in Burma and then, by common law, Stuart Edmonds, a wealthy dilettante artist. She had two children, to whom she appeared indifferent: a daughter who died in infancy and a son who was killed in World War Two. She fictionalised both her husbands, Ferguson appearing most memorably as the ...”

“... home about. Nell’s university friend Mal is flaky and given to disappearing acts; her housemate Stuart leaves his washing in the machine until it stinks. Carmel, whose story is threaded through Nell’s, admits to preferring men to women but knows few good ones personally. There is Edgardo, an ‘arrogant young man’ who got her pregnant and then broke ...”

“... of a pastiche of the Arts versus Science debate of the Sixties. Fogel is the champion of the ‘white woolly warmth of the quantitative revolution’, in which traditional ‘literary’ history will be displaced by a new ‘scientific’ history based on statistics and computing. Elton dissents, arguing against high-level generalisation and reasserting the ...”

“... in his opening sentences. Turning to page one of Talking It Over and reading that ‘My name is Stuart, and I remember everything,’ one can be pretty sure that Stuart’s problem is going to be that he can’t forget (and sure enough, 250 pages later, Stuart’s ex-wife is forced to ...”

“... to saints. But the Rent Strikes brought her out to the world with her small fists clenched in a white-knuckle fury. Fathers were dying in trenches. Children and wives were put out on the street. Effie was sick at her Glasgow windows. And looking down she saw other women, swaying sick at their windows too. Women stood on tenement stairs, covering their ...”

“... or the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, Pocock had begun to explore the archipelagic dimensions of Stuart history. However, geography is not a straightforward determinant of history. Sometimes the geographical underpinnings of grand narratives are as much a human construct as the narratives themselves. This is one of the dominant themes of Pocock’s ...”