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“... as hierarchy and subordination, and as ready to burn down a factory as to work in one. It is easy to see how the masters pined for a machine-like army, obedient, punctual, untainted by education, free from seditious rage, long-suffering, self-sacrificing, grateful for the lowest wage. But a factory was not a regiment. Ruskin is quoted as saying it was ...”

“... Female Accelerator, taking grateful advantage of the breast-rests fitted above the handlebars to ease the strain of leaning forward while on the march. Such supports (if they existed) were rendered unnecessary by the use of pedal power in the later velocipede. Nervous neophytes who doubted their ability to balance two-wheelers were taught by instructors in ...”

“... which used 35,798 tons of fuel oil on the Australia-New Zealand tour alone, with India, the Far East and Japan still to come. Mountbatten, then 19, went along to jolly the difficult and moody Prince, six years his senior. His log is laced with indiscretions to lighten the otherwise tedious record of receptions, parades, gun salutes and tribal dances. A ...”

“... How did the Great War – the first total war – affect the class structure of English society? An exhaustive answer, as Bernard Waites recognises, is probably beyond the power of any one historian. The difficulty is that class structure, or ‘social differentiation’, is something which, unlike crime or illegitimacy or whooping cough, defies both definition and statistical analysis ...”

“... of compensating for salt deficiency by mixing cows’ urine in the milk: ‘I always gave someone else my share of this blend.’ Thesiger says things like: ‘I had no intention of marrying; I valued personal freedom too highly for that. As for money, I had no expensive tastes, and wanted only to serve in places remote from civilisation, where the cost of ...”

“... business, spreading death and ruin. Compared with Esther, the heroine of Cathy Come Home had an easy ride. Portraying as it does a society rotted from top to bottom by gambling fever, Moore’s novel reads at times like one of those axe-grinding tales that used to be written to advance the cause of thrift, temperance or early closing. Occasionally the ...”

“... On a June night in 1917, in his home at Walton Heath in Surrey, the Prime Minister asked to be roused at 3 a.m., because there was something he did not want to miss: the big bang from afar which would signify that British sappers had blown the top off the German-held Messines ridge. The sound came through on schedule. This was almost certainly the greatest man-made explosion of pre-nuclear times ...”

“... The Bridge over the River Kwai, that stirring symphony of false notes, it can hardly have been an easy decision for Lomax to allow his life to be re-scripted and interpreted by others. Millions will have seen Prisoners in Time, but this well-written and well-judged book is the superior article. Newspapers have told how, even now, survivors of the Far Eastern ...”

“... his way to Constantinople to prevent a wild Islamic prophet, backed by Germany, from setting the East in flames. In the real world the Germans were backing a more potent troublemaker by smuggling Lenin to St Petersburg, thus establishing Russia as an inexhaustible source of fictional villains for the next two generations. Julian Symons in Bloody Murder ...”

“... wrote fat cheques to Lloyd George. Keeping faith with the hereditary principle has not always been easy. We are treated to a whole chapter about a peer who owed his seat in the Lords to being the product of a virgin birth, which might be thought the highest qualification of all. This is the story, strictly for grown-ups, of ‘the Russell baby case’, which ...”

“... Welcome, then, to this historic spa town, once calling itself the English Montpellier. The cherished waters, ideal for restoring the ‘animal functions’, have been reduced to a trickle from a single tap, hidden away from all but the curious; the Regency assembly rooms are the scene of a one-week monster carpet sale; and the crumbled colonnade for water-drinkers houses boutiques called Smarty Pants, Just Bums and Going for Bust ...”

“... From the 11th century to the 19th not a single Eric was to be found in England, according to the Harrap Book of Boys’ and Girls’ Names. Then in 1858 the schoolmaster Frederic Farrar, not yet a dean, published that passionately morbid tale Eric, or Little by Little. This was the book which, in the face of much mockery, put the wind up two generations of youth ...”

“... The great ocean liners were the landmarks, grace notes and sometimes the agents of history. Born as I was in the Belle Epoque, admittedly in its dying days, I was well placed to marvel at the mightiest moveable artefacts of that time: the ‘floating cities’ of Cunard’s four-funnelled, five-syllabled fleet, Lusitania, Aquitania and Mauretania. They were the civil equivalent of dreadnoughts and they competed with an aggressive Germany for the Blue Riband of the Atlantic, a non-existent but highly cherishable award for the fastest crossing, which the Lusitania snatched from the Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1907 ...”

“... to find her a decent niche in their Pantheon, though she exposed the lunacy laws which made it too easy for husbands to put away their tiresome wives, and showed how a spirited female could exploit the Married Woman’s Property Act. Brian Thompson, whose book was inspired by a chance-found set of her memoirs, pays tribute to her colossal energy, linked with ...”

“... on the mob in the Gordon Riots, had another claim to notice. As a sheriff of London, Sir Barnard Turner was instrumental in abolishing Tyburn as a place of execution. In so doing he ended the tumultuous turnout of ruffians, whores and honest citizens who cheered, or execrated, the deathcart on its way from Newgate along Tyburn Road, now Oxford Street, to the ...”