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“... did not appear until 1837 and was quickly supplanted by two popularising and very popular works, John Forster’s The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith (1848) and Washington Irving’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1849). Forster and Irving built on Prior’s research to reinstate – affectionately, but still damagingly – the simple, unworldly ...”

“... the privilege, but from the conviction that no one deserved it. And yet, the drafters of the new laws, and the guardians of the secret interpretation of those laws, do feel that they deserve the privilege; and if you could ask them why, they would answer: because there are elections. We, in America, now support a class of ...”

“... well of by their peers and to provide the material for favourable obituaries. The making of laws, the laying down of general rules and principles, albeit in the shape of specific decisions, is not the same as seeking justice in individual cases. The judge who follows his own instincts, without thought of the effects in consequential cases, is a ...”

“... Physics, in which he ‘was able to show’ that in a universe whose expansion never ceased ‘the laws of physics and information theory allow life to survive for ever using a finite store of energy.’ How could this be defended? As follows. In an ever-expanding, ever-cooling universe, the energy needed for processing each bit of information grows ...”

“... not a single ‘contingency’; everything in it is there in illustration of those general laws of human demeanour which he has spent his adult life searching out in the society around him. The novel, in fact, is his valediction to that society and to his own unworthy social self and the comments that he allows himself on it in his letters converge ...”

“... some potentially valuable ‘blood’. The Jews were the only group defined legally in Nazi-era laws, an ‘honour’ accorded to no one else, not even to racially insecure Bavarians, who wanted recognition as ‘Germans’. Because they were the only group so precisely defined, Jews were also the only group the Nazis could attempt to eradicate as a ...”

“... Sir John Low​ finally hung up his helmet seventy years after joining the Madras army in 1804, having served the East India Company as soldier, jailer, agent and councillor. As a rookie lieutenant, his regiment mopped up in Mysore when the British took over the old kingdom of Tipu Sultan. He helped see off the Marathas at the battle of Mahidpur in 1817, and kept their chief minister, Baji Rao, under house arrest on the banks of the Ganges ...”

“... for a period as long as two years, and required to attend overnight at an address elsewhere. These laws are based on anti-terror provisions, whose powers of forced relocation have gone without significant challenge, but their use will not be limited to criminals. They will apply to people who have done little more than attend two protests considered likely to ...”

“... are note-like sketches – the one of hanged men, for example, or the drawings of the entourage of John VIII Palaeologus, the Byzantine Emperor, made when he was attending the Council of Ferrara in 1438 – but it is the worked-up studies which best meet Facio’s description: of a horse harness drawn as though to instruct a farrier, and the different ...”

“... boasts of being ‘admired of those that hate [him] most’. ‘A sicke Machiavell Pollititian,’ John Stephens wrote in his Essays of 1615, ‘is a baked meate for the devill.’ No other political theorist has received remotely similar treatment. Hobbes, who came in for a handsome share of vilification from the 1650s, was namechecked as an early exponent of ...”

“... statesmen in Egypt and Libya, with evil American agents blackmailing honest Britishers. John Collee tells of a wonder cure for cancer devised by a Hindu mystic in a Scottish city where surgeons’ knives are used too readily and callously. Randolph Stow’s The Suburbs of Hell deals with ‘juicy murders’ committed in a Suffolk seaside town ...”

“... Stalinist stalwart of the CPGB, later authoritarian and ever-loyal Blairite home secretary, John Reid. An hour later, as I’m leaving, the following conversation takes place: Reid: Halloo. Me: Glad you jumped ship in time? Reid: I left after Blair resigned. Last three years and Broon a total disaster. Me: I agree. But you think Blair would have ...”

“... depression in the textile industry combined with food prices kept high by the protectionist Corn Laws (introduced in 1815) brought the poor to the brink of starvation. The stark new multistorey cotton mills of Manchester and Salford employed more and more men, women and children. Textiles, however, were still mostly produced in the traditional way by ...”

“... we need to know about Julia’s social position. Unobtrusive effects like this help to explain John Braine’s statement, reproduced on the dust-jacket of this new recruit to the trilogy, that a ‘whole generation of writers is in William Cooper’s debt, just as the previous generation was in James Joyce’s debt’. But this comparison, justified though ...”

“... of their view it might be urged that the Tory oligarchy of the early 19th century, with its Corn Laws and Game Laws and bribery and corruption, has a good claim to the title of ‘criminal’, and that most of those caught in the meshes of the law were victims from childhood of a perverted and hostile society. Hughes’s ...”