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“... Tales: they are printed the way they are because someone, after Chaucer’s death, had to make the best he could of what he had. Yet though everyone knows this, in a sort of a way, their profession makes critics dig order and unity out of somewhere: ‘Most studies of the Tales,’ Pearsall writes in an uncompromising footnote, ‘use one or other of the ...”

“... were ‘political’: ‘Diana – the only jewel in the crown’; ‘Charles, you’ve lost the best thing you ever had. Good luck to Wills and Harry,’ said one poster stuck to the railings of Buckingham Palace. As many people noted, the whole atmosphere was very ‘democratic’: rarely can the railings of our royal palaces have been treated with such ...”

“... with Macmillan. It is nice to be reminded of the Supermac style. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, called on Macmillan to tell him that whatever he did, he must not appoint Michael Ramsey as his successor, adding that he knew Ramsey well, had indeed been his headmaster at Repton. ‘Thank you, Your Grace, for your kind advice,’ Macmillan ...”

“... that while also cautioning readers about the teleological nature of Tawney’s historical work: as Geoffrey Elton charged, he came up ‘with the answers required by the faith that inspired the search’. I’m not sure those warnings are necessary: serious students of history no longer read Tawney as a guide to the 17th century. Nor is the binary Goldman sets ...”

“... success, the marriage itself was a failure. The couple lived apart and their union was ‘at best a marriage that petered out’, though we don’t know why. Critics more speculative than Turner have made much of the most disturbing life record: a legal document which shows that in 1380 Cecily Champaigne released ...”

“... Farm and Point du Jour, the French infantry at St Privat had turned their chassepots – then the best infantry rifles in the world – on the thick columns of Prussian guards spreading out across the fields below and pushing up the slopes towards the French positions. In his classic account of the war, the historian Michael Howard described what happened ...”

“... alternative to Sikorsky, they agreed, should be put together, and the Government should do its best to encourage it. Heseltine was out of the country in early November, but when he returned he set his mind to the task. On 26 November, he met Sir John Cuckney, who from the outset was anxious to proceed with the Sikorsky take-over, and told him he was ...”

“... sensational interest to the prim but prurient 1950s newspaper-reading public. The anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer had observed in his 1951 survey of British people that ‘though most English men and women cannot “let themselves go”, they love to think and read about people who do throw off inhibitions, either with sex or violence.’ The hunt was on to ...”

“... passage: ‘Among the neglected men I have found Robert Bage, Henry Brooke, John Bunyan, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Delaney [sic], Emanuel Ford, William Godwin, Richard Graves, Robert Greene, Robert Henryson, Charles Johnstone, Charles Lever, M.G. Lewis, Thomas Lodge, Henry MacKenzie [sic], Thomas Malory, Charles Maturin, Walter Scott, Philip ...”

“... a poem in memory of his grandmother and a miniature tale of unrest in India: these are among the best things in Time’s Oriel; and, with those instances to hand, it’s neither surprising to find ‘Wulf’ so sympathetically translated nor disconcerting to hear that woman’s voice, with its Old English accent, accompany the poet’s ‘Bavarian ...”

“... them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took possession of me.’ A recent series of ...”

“... pulled by two Shetland ponies . . . complete with coachman perched on high behind . . . Best of all, she was regularly piloted down the Avon in her own gondola, named The Dream. This vehicle was specially imported from Venice complete with gondolier, until the Latin’s quarrelsome inebriation compelled his replacement by her costumed ...”

“... His critics have responded in both ways, and sometimes in both ways at once – thereby, as Geoffrey Elton put it, ‘maintaining the difficult position that on the one hand the thesis only spells out what they have always said, while on the other it is not true.’ There is, in fact, something to be said for both complaints, though hardly enough to ...”

“... affair with the handyman, his mother-in-law is dying, his son is getting ready to leave home, his best friend thinks him a fool and that to everyone who comes into contact with him he is a self-esteeming joke. In 1984 one would just say,‘Oh, you mean he’s a man,’ and have done with it. But in 1971 the beast was less plain, the part harder to define, and ...”

“... reputation of Bagehot’s writings owed rather little to his role as editor and, conversely, the best-known of those writings were not representative of the paper’s contents. Indeed, when Bagehot himself wanted to write at length about the large questions that exercised the Victorian intellectual elite he did so in the pages of major cultural journals such ...”