“... to reorganise the dioceses, so as to fortify the Church against the Lutheran threat, which Wolsey took very seriously (and which the reader may suspect to have owed some of its following to anti-clericalism). If Wolsey’s plans for reforms were limited, it was because fundamental change was unnecessary. If they were not fully implemented, it was because he ...”

“... contacts. This utterly shocked opinion in every officers’ mess in Ulster – and in MI5, who took over intelligence operations there from MI6 in 1973. Exactly like the French Army before it in Algeria, these key circles within the British Army now decided that in order to prevent a sell-out of the imperial position in the overseas province by leftists ...”

“... devotees to complain that Americans have got him all wrong. As early as 1897, the radical John Jay Chapman presented him as a fellow iconoclast who had been miscast as an apologist for American selfishness, ‘embalmed in amber by the very forces he braved’. The tendency of biographers to make their own Emersons means that some academics dislike the ...”

“... such an event.A less well-known but more interesting scam than any of these was pulled off by Dr John Ackah Blay-Miezah, who persuaded investors across Ghana and the US that he was the sole beneficiary of a $27 billion trust fund hidden away in Swiss bank accounts by Kwame Nkrumah. He explained that as the former Ghanaian president’s closest confidant, he ...”

“... exhibition Mellor got in touch with her daughter, Boty Goodwin, who was then in her twenties. She took him to the family home in Kent and he saw a cache of her mother’s paintings, which transformed his ideas: ‘Suddenly the whole history of British Pop Art was different.’Well, yes and no. As Marc Kristal suggests in the introduction to his widely ...”

“... Mr Gray’, or some equivalent. By one account, when, near the end of his life, Gray visited St John’s College to meet the son of an acquaintance, ‘every College man took off his cap as he passed, a considerable number having assembled in the quadrangle to see Mr Gray, who was seldom seen.’ Gray managed the ...”

“... activists among the thousands of Luo who would travel to the city for the funeral. The Government took no chances. Mortuary and forensic formalities were hastily completed and the funeral service scheduled for the Tuesday, barely 72 hours after the murder, which didn’t allow much time for the long journeys that many would have to make from the Luo homelands ...”

“... events occurred not dissimilar to those described.’ However it came about, Lees-Milne certainly took the secretarial course. After that, to his father’s annoyance, he was wangled by his mother into Magdalen College, Oxford. His Eton housemaster, who was married to a friend of Mrs Lees-Milne, had been persuaded to write assuring the college that her son ...”

“... on the telephone, that he will very soon have to ‘disappear’. The discovery of authors such as John Cowper Powys, about whom Vaes knows nothing, is paralleled in his reinvention of London districts such as Kensal Rise, Shadwell and Fulham. Remaining in Belgium, he finds another London with which he is comfortable: a ‘malleable’ capital with more appeal ...”

“... the letter ‘Shelagh Delaney’, the name by which she would be known from then on.Littlewood took both the play and the playwright on, inviting Delaney to live with her and her husband while they got the script into shape. Delaney knew how lucky she was. She had a gift for dialogue – ‘writing as people talk’, as she put it – but she knew little ...”

“... Court chief US prosecutor, Truman made it plain that there would be a trial even if Britain took no part. Nazi Germany having ceased to exist, delegations from the US, the USSR, Britain and France, the four powers that had set up military governments in the zones into which Germany had been divided, agreed in London on 8 August 1945 to establish an ...”

“... the early 1960s, right-wing insurgents – self-consciously using the model of Communist cells – took over the GOP, repudiated the moderation of its leaders, among them President Eisenhower and the New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, and built a formidable counter-establishment infrastructure that extended from local school boards to state capitols to ...”

“... But it is an unignorable backdrop to imperial history in late antiquity. That history took in much of Europe, the Near East and the Mediterranean in the fourth and earlier fifth century, and its narrative centre is usually the western empire, where Rome lay. Constantinople tends to become an onlooker, fuelling the suspicion that real Roman history ...”

“... more often than not a pipe protruded, and a hearty disposition.’ Malcolm Muggeridge immediately took to Arthur Ransome when he first met him in Cairo in 1929. Most people did. The philosopher R.G. Collingwood, a close friend from their shared childhood in the Lake District, gave Ransome his entire life savings to pay his legal costs when he was sued by the ...”

“... that a firm, clear, shared language would show the way to a true socialism. And although each took a holistic view of language, neither showed any interest in a unified account of the world. All these philosophers, however, did assume that the point of language was to describe the world, however difficult or indeed impossible it might be to know that ...”