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“... level with the motorway, is the interchange of the M8 and the M74, which leads eventually to the English border. The interchange is one of the city’s largest structures, and as you poke around – mostly alone – you get a sense of what a grand public project this was, how generously landscaped, if now rather neglected. Heading east underneath the ...”

“... And as schools of war, the Unions are unexcelled. In them is developed the peculiar courage of the English. Some strange allusions yet some familiar resonances in the conclusions of the young Friedrich Engels after his first eventful contact with the labour movement in Lancashire at the height of the second Chartist upsurge. His diagnosis of a close nexus ...”

“... his release from prison in 1930: entitled Die Geächteten (‘the ostracised’, published in English translation shortly afterwards as The Outlaws), it was an unapologetic glorification of the violent and extreme nationalism from which these young men drew inspiration. The killing sent a shockwave through the fledgling Weimar Republic. In the subsequent ...”

“... so very irrelevant. The renewal of interest was signalled by the publication in 1996 of a revised, English-language edition of Bley’s now classic work, as Namibia under German Rule. Monographs and articles began to appear on colonialist discourse in Germany, on the colonial origins of racial science and on representations of colonial subjects in ...”

“... officers and soldiers, engineers, armaments specialists and other professionals to join him on English territory. The Free French army was intended to be a conventional military force, located in England, where it would prepare for the invasion of the Continent. De Gaulle did nothing to help the French who remained at home wage a guerrilla war, engage in ...”

“... Walking along the main street of Farnham one afternoon, Richard Hoggart was accosted by a drunk. He didn’t ask for money or spit ill-focused abuse. ‘I know who you are,’ he slurred, ‘and I’ve got one question for you. Who’s the better writer, you or Raymond Williams?’ Reading this, I found I was disappointed that the level of literary criticism among Farnham’s drunks was so low ...”

“... The best thing on Stendhal in English is an essay by Lytton Strachey in which he remarks the way the author denovelises the novel while skilfully retaining all its traditional apparatus. Stendhal’s imagination is a kind of parody of Scott’s: his sensibility is itself its own journal and his own memoir. Reviewing Stendhal’s last book, The Charterhouse of Parma, when it appeared in 1839, Balzac noted admiringly that the novel ‘often contained a whole book in a single page ...”

“... Cosima von Bülow (née Liszt) met the composer Richard Wagner briefly in 1853, lived with him from 1864, bearing three children, and married him in 1870. She was a devoted wife, who put up with every whim and eccentricity of a being she acknowledged as the embodiment of genius: she had married her first husband after she had heard him conducting the overture to Tannhäuser and realised that genius needed genius to interpret it: in her relation with Richard she was to display her own genius too ...”

“... A few servants managed to reach a port and sneak back to England, resulting in lawsuits in the English courts, but escape required nerve, stamina and luck. Watchful householders would raise the alarm, and recapture had dreadful consequences. Flight was punishable by flogging or, even worse, extension of the term of service.In the 17th century the typical ...”

“... on the bronze plaque on the stern, but only by tilting your head can you make out the faded ‘RICHARD’ below.I now know a good deal about the Bonhomme Richard. I know that it was originally a French merchant vessel called the Duc de Duras; that it was loaned to the fledgling US navy; and that it took part in the War ...”

“... al. She seems no less expert with the Yiddish of an older master, Sholom Aleichem, best-known to English readers as the chronicler of the Jewish poor in the shtetl of the 1880s, the low-life, high-thinking world of Fiddler on the Roof. The world of Marienbad, in 1911, is more classy and farcical: plenty of high life and low thinking. The Bohemian holiday ...”

“... enter into the phenomenon of Peterley Harvest, a novel composed by the librarian and bibliographer Richard Pennington and offered to the world by him and his first publisher – in what spirit it is for us to examine – as the genuine diary, covering the years 1930 to 1939, of a certain David Peterley, scion of an ancient landed family. Peterley’s diary and ...”

“... when the valley of Tryweryn, in north-west Wales, was flooded to create a reservoir to serve the (English) city of Liverpool. No Welsh MP supported the bill that enabled the reservoir to be built. Seventy people had to leave their homes. The words ‘Cofiwch Dryweryn’ (‘Remember Tryweryn’), written on the wall of a ruined cottage near ...”

“... Beano, the Dandy, Scotland’s Sunday Post) and the Protestant Truth Society. The printer Richard Pynson worked from here; the black-letter colophon to his A ful deuout and gostely treatyse of the imytacion and folowynge the blessed lyfe of oure moste mercyfull sauyoure cryste (1517) declares: ‘This boke Inprinted at London in Fletestrete at the ...”

“... not so much politicians as sublime social columnists who happened to sit in the House of Commons. Richard Crossman and Barbara Castle were heavyweights and professionals, and the eternal grind of committee life is reflected in their accounts. Yet both were writing with the special excitement of socialist voyeurs. Determined to expose the secrets of Whitehall ...”