“... in this volume (especially by current or former Labour politicians, including both Milibands, James Purnell, Hazel Blears, Jon Cruddas) is just the usual political blah-blah: Labour has to learn to admit its mistakes without diminishing its achievements, it has to find a new narrative to explain its vision for Britain, it has to harness the leadership ...”

“... provided the impetus, addressing meetings of mayors and industrialists to whip up enthusiasm while Henry Cole got on with the practicalities of presenting what the prince envisaged as a ‘living encyclopedia’ of international production. The resulting display in the Crystal Palace was a kind of Benthamite panopticon, a rational arrangement of all of human ...”

“... The legend goes that Yardley’s operation was closed down by Hoover’s secretary of state, Henry Stimson, who supposedly said: ‘Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.’ What a nice sentiment. Of course, there’s no evidence that he said any such thing, and the moment the Cipher Bureau was shut in 1929 its files were transported from New York to ...”

“... good against the excesses of private gain. His ancestors include such muckraking journalists as Henry Demarest Lloyd, whose Wealth against Commonwealth told the sordid tale of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, as well as politicians such as William Jennings Bryan, Robert La Follette and even (for a while) Woodrow Wilson, whose New Freedom campaign of ...”

“... the travelling roadshow organised by Shaftesbury and Buckingham around the King’s bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth, was playing to rapturous crowds. Activists among the country gentry, incensed by the long prorogation of Parliament in 1675, and by then convinced that Charles II would never accept Parliament as a partner in government, had for some ...”

“... his advocacy of mostly British architecture, from the Brutalist buildings of the Smithsons and James Stirling, through the Pop designs of Archigram and Cedric Price, to the high-tech megastructures of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, so providing a critical genealogy for these postwar architects as well. Despite his smooth narrative, Whiteley does not paper ...”

“... for an unlikely reputation to rescue, reputations don’t come much unlikelier than that of Henry Morton Stanley. Widely excoriated in his own time as one of the most brutal of African travellers, condemned by historians for his part in the creation of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, and derided both then and since for his famous but ...”

“... on the cover, but inside, the anxieties I’ve been talking about are more humanly displayed. Henry Sutton writes about being a ‘Broken-Up Man’. It starts with him crying in front of his seven-year-old daughter: A friend of mine keeps ringing me up to say that being a bloke and getting divorced means I’m on a one-way ticket to a bedsit in ...”

“... One from 1965 named Prell after its central component, a very green shampoo, was well described by James Schuyler: A dozen bottles of Prell – that insidious green – terrible green roses and grapes, glass dangles like emeralds, long strings of green glass beads, a couple of strands looped up. Under glass, in the centre, a blue-green pietà, sweating an ...”

“... is perhaps not entirely absent from Hilliard’s world. The portrait miniature of the young Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, dated 1594, inevitably calls Shakespeare to mind, because in this year his narrative poem Lucrece was published with a dedication to the earl. It is widely argued, though not proved, that Southampton is also the ‘fair ...”

“... church.Many puritans were young, rejecting convention and seeking an identity. The Hebrew scholar Henry Ainsworth spent his early twenties drifting from Norfolk to London to Ireland to Amsterdam, subsisting on boiled roots and the word of God. Even mature figures such as Robert Browne, who in the 1580s lent his name to Ainsworth’s brethren ...”

“... Theory of the Gimmick concludes, boldly and brilliantly, with a meticulous analysis of Henry James’s late fiction. Ngai has noticed that the investigations of opaque social and moral circumstance conducted in these novels and stories have the effect of exposing an over-reliance, in times of emergency, on waged and unwaged care-providers ...”

“... for their sound. Hawkers were the voice of many cities – the travel writer and historian James Howell advised 17th-century tourists on the continent to keep their windows open when lodging at an urban inn so that they could hear the cries of the town and better understand how it worked and the language its people spoke. Samuel Pepys, not averse to a ...”

“... Stumbling​ out of the pouring rain on the Isle of Skye, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson found a welcome in the house of Allan MacDonald at Kingsburgh. Dr Johnson had developed a nasty cold; Boswell was wet and thirsty and delighted to get indoors. ‘There was a comfortable parlour,’ he wrote in his journal in the autumn of 1773, ‘with a good fire, and a dram of admirable Hollands gin went round ...”

“... what remained of its North American possessions: in the 1840s Toronto tripled in size). As James Belich showed in Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World (2009), more British investment went to the Australian colonies in the 1870s and 1880s than anywhere else in the world. In 1835, Melbourne had no permanent ...”