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“... and blamed their failures on the dead weight of resistance at all levels of society. John Cook, Charles I’s prosecutor, said that ‘we would have enfranchised the people, if the nation had not more delighted in servitude than in freedom.’ William Sedgwick told the generals that ‘not one of a hundred will own what you set down as the public interest ...”

“... narrators ‘have a DISSECTIVE property in common, which is essentially not theirs but yours’. Charles Lever’s A Day’s Ride, on the other hand, was a disaster, and Dickens had to move in smartly with Great Expectations. His sensitive negotiations with Lever and with other novelists such as Charles Reade and Bulwer ...”

“... that all men might see that she was with child’. What was it these men saw? It was reported to Charles V that his daughter-in-law was exhibiting the ‘customary symptoms’ of pregnancy: her colouring, ‘the state of her breasts’, the fact that her dresses no longer did up. She was expected to give birth in May 1555; a nursery was prepared and a cradle ...”

“... king were taking on God. Ann Fanshawe, the daughter of a royalist MP, who was 17 when she fled to Charles I’s wartime headquarters in Oxford, likened herself to a fish out of water. The conflict between king and Parliament was supposed to end with one big battle at Edgehill on 23 October 1642. But it lasted four years. And even after ...”

“... nun.’ Later on, her two mentors were the ponderous and pedantic philosopher Herbert Spencer and Charles Booth the social investigator and a live wire who introduced her to the world of politics and philanthropy. But to neither could she give her heart. ‘I must pour my poor crooked thoughts into somebody’s heart,’ she wrote, aged 15, at the beginning ...”

“... a law to make contraceptives available for the first time in Ireland, the then minister for health Charles Haughey described it as ‘an Irish solution to an Irish problem’. Permitting women to travel abroad for abortion is another such solution: keep the issue out of sight and out of mind. The abortion rate in Ireland will not fall if the referendum ...”

“... sodomy. On such occasions it was customary for the condemned to confess his guilt, if only in the hope of persuading the authorities to take pity on his widow and children, for the property of a felon belonged to the Crown. Indeed, had Castlehaven been willing in the days before his execution to beg for mercy he would quite likely have been pardoned. But he ...”

“... write another ‘film-book’. There have been a lot of good ones published since the war, but I hope to do better than that. It will, I hope, be the story of a young man of the 20th century and his Muse, his dazzling, dancing, fascinating mistress. I owe it to my cock-teasing mistress to get it all down. Much that is ...”

“... The 20th century,’ Charles Sabel remarks in his essay in the collection in honour of Albert Hirschman, ‘has been a gigantic lesson in the transformability of theories, political programmes and institutions through their recombination in new contexts.’ It is a revealing remark. For although most of what now goes on in the ‘advanced’ societies – in what since the Bandung Conference of 1955 have sometimes been thought of as the First and Second Worlds – has indeed turned out to be very different from what was once expected; and although there is now also an even more varied Third World; that’s to say, although almost everything, event and context, has confounded expectation and will no doubt continue to do so – nevertheless the theories we have with which to understand, expect and direct it all are increasingly antique ...”

“... If Bill Rodgers, a privy councillor for thirty years, didn’t have the answers, what hope is there for the rest of us? What is this council, who are its members and what on earth does it do? The members include all present and past members of the cabinet, most living speakers and chief whips of parliament, a few members of the royal family, some ...”

“... at length about his architectural hero, Albert Speer, whom he continues to see as the last great hope of classical urbanism. Speer, in Krier’s eyes, was the tragic victim of Nuremberg, incarcerated in Spandau because he was guilty of a passion for Doric columns, while the far more destructive Wernher von Braun was judged useful enough to be whisked to ...”

“... full French control over the colony. The French forces, commanded by Napoleon’s brother-in-law Charles Leclerc, had some initial success. They captured Louverture, and shipped him back to France, where he died in captivity in 1803. But an epidemic of yellow fever killed many of the Europeans (Leclerc died of it) and opened the way to a black victory. On 1 ...”

“... burden of explanation, as William Lamont and Nicholas Tyacke have shifted it, onto the reign of Charles I and the regime of Archbishop Laud, ‘the greatest calamity ever visited upon the English Church’. Although that verdict is unlikely to go unchallenged, even those who question it should welcome Collinson’s determination to view the Jacobean Church ...”

“... about Cameron of Lochiel, whose decision, against his better judgment, to come out for Prince Charles Edward Stuart in 1745 won the clans for the Pretender and doomed the ancient culture of the Highlands to extinction. ‘That gentleman, whose rent never exceeded five hundred pounds a year, carried, in 1745, eight hundred of his own people into the ...”

“... habit of using familiar first names to describe celebrities they will never meet. ‘Are you with Charles or Di?’ Can’t say I know them well enough to be sure. Have you conceivably confused me with someone else? Someone who cares? I left Henry Kissinger’s name hanging around up there. It’s true that he seems to have slid down the charts but don’t be ...”