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“... based, on voice: the novel in which the main character is the voice in which the story is told. In Alexander Stuart’s second novel, The War Zone, the storytelling voice belongs to Tom, an adolescent whose family has just moved from London, which he liked, to Devon, which he hates: ‘the people down here don’t know they’re alive.’ He misses the ...”

“... The first time Alexander Masters met Stuart Shorter, he was crouched in a doorway next to the discount picture-framing shop round the corner from Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge: as it happens, the framing shop I used to work for as a sandwich boarder in my teens. Every Saturday the shop owner would hand me a board and a stack of leaflets and I’d hurry down to Christ’s Pieces, a public green in town which was also, I now know, Stuart’s home ...”

“... Saxon historian Widukind inclined him to think that the Saxons were descended from the soldiers of Alexander the Great. Similarly, some Franks fondly imagined that their people had a Trojan origin. Both Dr McKitterick and Mr Leyser endeavour to see past such images, delusions and sheer propaganda in order to reveal a truer picture of barbarian Europe. For Dr ...”

“... in exchanges of opinion, particularly on political topics. He remarks that he agreed with General Alexander Haig’s political opinions when he met him, but he otherwise leaves imprecise and undecidable topics out of the account. The exhilaration of reading him comes from his own communicated enjoyment of his very honourable batting average, and his related ...”

“... line of English kings reaching back to the Saxon era. In the process they rehabilitated the Stuart dynasty: the Virginia Almanac of 1741, for instance, commemorated 30 January as the day Charles I was martyred. By the 1740s, McConville reckons, ‘Americans understood the Hanoverian monarchy to rule by a kind of benevolent divine right,’ and George ...”

“... was rapidly becoming his chief confidant. In 1588 James arranged Huntly’s marriage to Henrietta Stuart, daughter of his former favourite the Duke of Lennox, thus admitting him into the wider royal family. In the following decade, Huntly’s various escapades – the murder of the Earl of Moray; the ‘Spanish Blanks’ affair, an offer by Scottish Catholics ...”

“... almost unprompted – to repeat yet again the story of how she had hidden Prince Charles Edward Stuart in the summer of 1746, almost thirty years before, and smuggled him across the sea from Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides to Skye. That was her past. But Flora would soon need all that resourcefulness again. Ahead of her was a much longer and harsher ...”

“... In The Political World of Thomas Wentworth – a distinguished collection of essays on one Stuart minister who advanced British hegemony – Peter Lake urges historians not to link Early Modern crises ‘directly to contemporary concerns about Northern Ireland, the union with Scotland and the European union’. It strikes me that Lake devalues the ...”

“... of Greece, ranging ‘from the earliest period to the close of the generation contemporary with Alexander the Great’, was a work of heroic industry in reading, sifting, assimilating and composing; nor was it all he did for the understanding of classical Greece, for he was to go on to write Plato and the Other Companions of Socrates and an unfinished study ...”

“... In 1779, a Scottish doctor called William Alexander published a two-volume History of Women. Alexander was a man of the Enlightenment who regarded politeness to women as a mark of civilisation. Savages and ‘musselmen’ might treat their women as sexual helots, but a gentleman was solicitous of his womenfolk ...”

“... upwards of five thousand persons – ‘the size of the Jacobite army under Prince Charles Edward Stuart’, noted the Scotsman’s reporter – assembled on the tableland for the 250th birthday. Around 10 a.m. the queue of motor carriages stretched back down into Inverness. After a dry winter the sombre morass was a lot more walkable than usual. No ...”

“... to it all my knowing readers will instantly understand just what I mean.’As Joseph Hone shows in Alexander Pope in the Making, Pope began his writing life as a predominantly manuscript poet writing for ‘tight-knit recusant networks’ in the Thames Valley. Hone argues that for the early part of his career Pope not only wrote for but shared the political ...”

“... attacks on Orwell from the Left. The militants are Malcolm Evans, Alan Brown, Alaric Jacob, Bill Alexander, Robert Stradling, Beatrix Campbell, Deirdre Beddoe, Stephen Sedley, Lynette Hunter, Andy Croft, Stuart Hall, Antony Easthope and Christopher Norris. The attacks are now commonplace. Raymond Williams and other writers ...”

“... one of the affluent dentist sons so deeply regretted in ‘The Closing down of Summer’. He is Alexander MacDonald, known to the extended MacDonald family on Cape Bret-on as gille beag ruadh (‘little red boy’) to distinguish him from his numerous other kinsfolk in clann Chalum Ruaidh (‘the clan of Calum the Red’) with the same name. All are ...”

“... which is based on that radio programme, and stars Keira Knightley as the feminist historian Sally Alexander. It’s positioned – as Pride (2014) was to Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners in the 1980s, and Made in Dagenham (2010) was to the Ford sewing machinists’ strike of 1968 – to allow viewers some minutes of unchallenging celebration that ...”