“... An engraved portrait published in Padua in 1650 is captioned ‘Laura Sada Avinionensis’ and is said to be based on a painting in the possession of the family. The abbé Jacques-François de Sade proudly discussed his family connection with her in his Mémoires pour la vie de François Pétrarque (1764). He discovered those documents – the marriage ...”

“... generator of war and peace, stability and chaos, prosperity and dearth. As Clausewitz might have said, shooting wars are trade wars carried on by other means. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, for instance, came after the tsar quit the Continental Blockade. Through the Middle Ages, there seems to have been a presumption that unimpeded, if not untaxed, trade ...”

“... and enlivened’ by an innocent love of mischief. She drily adds: ‘Of his modesty, it may be said that though everyone remarked on his reluctance to talk about himself, it is not recorded that anyone ever failed to get him to do so.’ Rider Haggard, in turn, obviously used Selous as a basis for Allan Quatermain in King Solomon’s Mines (1885). Like ...”

“... structure. The Lindbergh kidnapping of 1932 became so huge a national melodrama – it was, said H.L. Mencken, ‘the greatest story since the Resurrection’ – that Edgar Hoover (who co-ordinated the kidnap hunt) became, for the first time, a national figure. Nonetheless, once FDR won the election it seemed clear that Edgar Hoover was finished: the ...”

“... a mine. (He survived, minus a leg.)‘You’re watching the counter-offensive? It’s hard,’ I said to the driver in Russian. He was an older man; he might not speak English, I don’t speak Ukrainian, and I thought he probably wouldn’t mind my speaking the language of the aggressor, which is also one of the languages of Kyiv, unless he objected to the ...”

“... Their ideology, however, is a cultural version of it. Until recently, as the Barbadan poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite says, West Indians ‘have been unable to afford the luxury of mythology’. Colonial history offers merely divisive images which can only provoke nostalgia, remorse, shame or rancour. Hence many West Indian writers have sought to re-align ...”

“... teaching officers were without a college fellowship. So the former secretary of the Cabinet, Edward Bridges, was invited to examine what could be done. True to form, the colleges turned down his main, and the university his secondary, recommendation. Commensality means a lot to Brooke. Cambridge should be a community of scholars not a nine-to-five ...”

“... rode out to do battle with bureaucracy, nepotism and sloth. A.H. Layard had ‘often heard it said’, he told the Commons, ‘why does not the Government allow some great firm to contract for carrying on the war? This question, however ludicrous it may appear, is based upon a very good common-sense view of the war.’ Two great contractors, Paxton and ...”

“... about treating America, one of their own, nearly as shamefully, for ideological purposes, as, in Edward Said’s brilliant dissections, they have treated the Orient. ‘America’ is their inevitable metaphor for ‘modernity’ in opposition to a metaphoric past called ‘Europe’, and just about anything at all can be ...”

“... world. In the secret services – just like Oxbridge colleges – it appears this didn’t apply. Edward Heath describes MI5 operatives as the sort of men who would follow people on the Underground because they were reading the Daily Mirror. Lords Carver, Beloff and Dacre – establishment figures, with hardly a pale pink political opinion between the three ...”

“... contemporaries. Lord Hugh Cecil remarked in his popular book Conservatism of 1912: ‘It may be said that many men are brought to support the Conservative rather than any other political party, because they believe its policy on foreign and colonial matters are wise and patriotic. Nay, those principles have done more than secure widespread support for the ...”

“... on Monday morning. The consultant’s fee was reasonable: £30. ‘No problem,’ the patient said. In effect, this £30 paid for a private latchkey into hospital. If in other respects his history had been similar to mine he would, by the use of this latchkey, have cut out three to four weeks of waiting around and getting weak. But, from the moment of ...”

“... do. But it is also because it is not precisely clear how any of these issues can realistically be said to be continuous throughout Britain’s recent history. Entrepreneurial failure is a very different thing in the 1980s from what it was a century before, and the social structure, however defective it might be to its critics, is not the same as it was a ...”

“... his dreams, that the pioneering work of Krafft-Ebing was published and, nearer home, that Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis were calling for sexual liberation. Ellis was a close friend of Arthur Symons, a key contributor to the Savoy, had gone on a pilgrimage to Paris to meet Verlaine, the emblematic Decadent and, like Beardsley, publicly asserted ...”

“... verity: “Gentlemen, mom is a jerk.” ’ And he was not alone in his views. The psychiatrist Edward Strecker, for example, elaborated on the horrors of ‘momism’ in his 1946 book Their Mothers’ Sons, and then, ten years later, in Their Mothers’ Daughters. Like Wylie, he thought that mom’s most horrifying attribute was her ability to thwart the ...”