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“... us that he judged the invasion would result in no harm to him, since, among other factors, two major benefic aspects were in evidence (the scheme’s ascending degree was in a trine aspect of 120° to his natal sun, and the moon in a sextile aspect of 60° to his ascendant). What a comfort it must have been, even if the promised result never eventuated, to ...”

“... life of Civvy Street, when the Kray Twins ruled London – or so the timorous newspapers claimed. John Dickson, a former member of the Krays’ firm, has somehow produced a well-written book, Murder without Conviction. ‘We looked like any normal businessmen in our pin-striped suits,’ he says, describing the firm’s negotiations with the Mafia. The Krays ...”

“... account he gives. One must assume that ‘economic and social history’ means everything from Sir John Clapham and Max Weber to the theory of mental states, the study of working-class culture, anthropology, demography, political sociology and social psychology, urban history, the study of the family, and the history of science and technology. Would Kenyon’s ...”

“... irritated by talk of class conflict, and is not exactly in congratulatory mood when he calls John Carey the most class-conscious critic of the modern age. (The literary hackles raised by Carey’s recent memoir, The Unexpected Professor, which puts the petty-bourgeois boot into patrician dons, revealed just what kind of talk remains unacceptable in a ...”

“... the last twenty years, this negative consensus has been chipped away at by many historians. Yet major barriers to a genuine reassessment of Mary’s Church remain. The greatest of these is the burning of more than 280 Protestant men, women and teenagers between February 1555 and November 1558. This was the most intense religious persecution anywhere in ...”

“... gathered on Blackheath, entering London the next day. Joined by many from the city, they sacked John of Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy and forced the king, the 14-year-old Richard II, to meet them at Mile End. There, on 14 June, Richard made major concessions, the most important being the abolition of villeinage. While ...”

“... the point when it had reached its fashionable peak, but passed its heyday as a hunting ground for major antiquities and old master paintings. It follows that there are no great works of classical art on show. The only important antiquities on the Westmorland are now lost, a pair of priapic marble fauns belonging to the collector Charles Townley. In their ...”

“... But I wish I had pursued more energetically the quest for papers at Belvoir Castle (Lord John Manners and George Smythe), Weston Park (Lady Bradford and Lady Chesterfield) and Windsor Castle, where there apparently still exists a notable private correspondence with Queen Victoria alleged by Lord Esher in 1905 to have been destroyed by King Edward ...”

“... capacity of 100 kilotons; at Sellafield, thirty miles further round the coast and the next major employer after Barrow, is a nuclear waste reprocessing plant which has discharged millions of gallons of ‘low-grade’ radioactive waste into the Irish Sea. Just before I went up to Cumbria, the news broke that the area’s notoriously high incidence of ...”

“... hard for you, dealing with these wretches day after day.’ ‘No, it’s easy. I take them to a major eatery. I say, Pooh pooh pooh. I say, Drinky drinky drinky. I tell them their books are doing splendidly in the chains. I tell them readers are flocking to the malls. I say, Coochy coochy coo. I recommend the roast monkfish with savoy cabbage. I tell them ...”

“... ridicule as Molière chose to portray them on the stage. Precious or not, they were in favour of a major spelling reform, as comes out in a brief scene quoted by Cerquiglini from Somaize’s Grand dictionnaire des Précieuses: ‘Roxalie said that they must so go about things as to make it possible to write the same [de mesme in the French, inevitably!] as one ...”

“... a run-of-the-mill effort. They were wrong. The novel went on to win an unprecedented five major prizes in its first year and made the New York Times bestseller list. From a standing start, Patricia Cornwell became a one-woman fiction factory, and a cult. She has produced seven Scarpetta novels since 1990 – a knackering rate of work which she ...”

“... warm to Burchfield or his book. ‘Anyone who has spent nearly thirty years, as I did, editing a major dictionary on historical principles is bound to prefer a historical approach to English usage to one that is limitedly descriptive.’ This historical emphasis is coupled with a desire to produce something much closer to a standard, orthodox, reliable work ...”

“... that even a fraction of the tax owed will be recovered. In 2004 the leadership of the two major political parties, Pasok and New Democracy, was taken up by descendants of their founders: respectively, George Papandreou, son of Andreas and grandson of Georgios, and Kostas Karamanlis, nephew and namesake of the first metapolitefsi prime ...”

“... a variety of scholars to discuss the history of the Italian and international working classes. Major figures on the Italian Left, such as Angelo Tasca, a companion of Gramsci in Turin in the early 1920s, and Pietro Secchia, the hard man of the PCI in the 1940s and 1950s, left their papers and even their libraries to the Institute. Having founded this ...”