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“... College, to which he bequeathed his huge library. His father’s record of the Putney Debates lay buried, unseen and apparently unnoticed, in the bowels of the college library for the whole of the 18th and almost all the 19th centuries. During that time, historians of the English Revolution had to make do with state papers and memoirs. When, in old ...”

“... Epistles set out to do just that. Taking their cue from a nucleus of genuine letters written by Paul of Tarsus, they call themselves Paul when they are not Paul, Peter when they are not Peter, James when they are not James, Jude when they are not Jude. Sometimes they put in ...”

“... drawing out the best from boys as individuals’. Another interest, not mentioned by Sir William, lay in drawing down the underpants of boys – as individuals – before ordering them to lie on his sofa while he spanked their bare buttocks. In his Introduction, the author Mark Peel pays tribute to Trench’s ‘common touch’ without referring to his most ...”

“... in Bermuda, or some other far-flung corner of their former realm: Port Stanley, say, or Balmoral. Paul Burrell will have packed their bags for them one last time. The ‘irony’ of which, as Burrell would say (the only words that he misuses more often are ‘surreal’ and ‘enormity’), is that he’s a die-hard monarchist, as he reveals in his memoir, A ...”

“... cars and could not abide the sight of the motorist in front: he simply had to overtake. His genius lay in the fact that he never crashed. So it was in history. Taylor wanted pace, movement, fun, risk. He was perfectly capable of analysis. But as it meant stopping the car and tinkering under the bonnet, he was impatient to get back behind the wheel. His ...”

“... pretensions for his subject, which expose him so easily to attack, that make him significant. They lay bare the hopes, the quasi-millenarian inspiration and the sense of vital civic function which fuel the energies and set the agenda of much historical writing, even if its practitioners go about with their coats modestly buttoned over these primitive instincts ...”

“... of children, the comments of neighbours, even the sounds of farm animals. In 1903, as his daughter lay dying of rheumatic heart disease, Janáček notated her strangled cries. ‘Whenever someone spoke to me,’ he told an interviewer late in life, ‘even if I didn’t grasp the words, I grasped the rise and fall of the notes! I knew what the person was ...”

“... ballet festival in New York, it omitted the year 1954, was exiguous with five others, failed to lay proper emphasis on what he now sees as the crucial years of 1951 and 1956 or to supply an adequate context for the Sixties; and Craft did not want it reprinted. Now he has gone to the trouble of remedying the defects with a revised edition that extends the ...”

“... Marlow arrives at a philosophical conclusion: ‘The truth seems to be that it is impossible to lay the ghost of a fact.’ Marlow can’t have known that he was sketching a theory of deconstruction as it was later elaborated by Paul de Man, and he was certainly hesitant enough about his proposition. But de Man’s ...”

“... their youth had been ‘smashed up’ by the Great War. Nearly a million men of their generation lay buried in Flanders and Gallipoli; many of those who remained felt condemned to hollow lives, haunted by loss and grief. They believed that those sacrificed had been men of special grace, the irreplaceable flower of the nation’s youth; and they blamed the ...”

“... allusions. Bulwer-Lytton himself had inaugurated the fashion for this brand of crime fiction with Paul Clifford (1830), and restrained the tendency to verbosity and false pathos that marks his other fiction. He believed, he wrote in an essay of 1838, that in the portraiture of evil and criminal characters lies the widest scope for an author profoundly versed ...”

“... R.W. Burchfield and John Sykes) is comparatively stable. When work began on the new Collins, Paul Procter and Della Summers were young conductors under impresario Urdang, and they later moved on to make dictionaries for Longman. Patrick Hanks was recruited to complete the Collins when he had finished a somewhat similar job for Hamlyn. Both Urdang and ...”

“... be. Finally he took on the huge vested interests of free trade and lost. The genius of Chamberlain lay in his capacity to tap and mobilise hitherto unexploited sources of energy and enthusiasm. But the restless forces were never as strong in Britain as the laws of inertia and the politics of Sleepy Hollow. Contemplating the fate of Joseph Chamberlain, we can ...”

“... people, unlikely parents of a man who had been convicted of shooting Michael Gregsten dead in a lay-by off the A6, raping his girlfriend Valerie Storie and then shooting her, leaving her for dead before driving off in the couple’s car. Among the guests at the wake were Jean Justice, who told me he was a (rather elderly) law student, and his friend, a ...”

“... David Spiegelhalter, now Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge, and Paul Aylin, now the assistant director of the Dr Foster Unit at Imperial College. You might think that their task was relatively straightforward. After all, the figure that matters here, the mortality rate, is simply the number of patients who died after ...”