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“... from the estate of James Mendez, a Jewish merchant of Portuguese descent. Mendez bought them from William Chapman in 1720, just after the collapse of the South Sea Company, in which Chapman was a shareholder. How and when the paintings arrived in Britain isn’t known, but by the time Mendez got hold of them they had already been identified as Zurbarán’s ...”

“... But this is a version of Anglo-Irish decline as far as possible from the plangent world of William Trevor, or even Elizabeth Bowen.Aroon narrates her story in the late 1950s or early 1960s, and it’s hard not to compare it with Bowen’s pitch-perfect Anglo-Irish romance, A World of Love, published in 1955. Bowen’s novel is also gloriously ...”

“... The place of science in this project has never been properly studied, a situation now rectified by Trevor Levere and his Poetry realised in Nature. This is a work of great devotion, involving a hunt for scattered original materials, with extensive use of the products of the University of Toronto, where whole skyscrapers now seem packed with the notes and ...”

“... class. Brass bands were not originally working-class institutions. They were led at first by what Trevor Herbert calls ‘the socially superior classes’; they depended on a musical establishment with a taste for classical and religious music; they were formed into a network and encouraged to compete at open-air shows by entrepreneurs, instrument makers and ...”

“... the help of the obituary notice contributed to the Proceedings of the British Academy for 1977 by William McNeill, an American scholar who has a close affinity with his subject. Toynbee was born in 1889 into a family with Evangelical associations; like the celebrated uncle he was named after, his father was a social worker. At Winchester he was trained to win ...”

“... a memory stunt summoning all the ghosts of his long career, his busy life. The writer Jack Trevor Story is presented as a moral touchstone, the exemplar of a better period – jazz, film-scripts, novels sold three times over under different titles; the third wife, the fifth bankruptcy. These sidebars have sidebars, addenda foliate in Mandelbrotian ...”

“... cannot hope quite to recreate. We can glimpse it in the tributes to Sidney by the great historian William Camden, who had studied with him at Christ Church, Oxford. Camden was no friend to international Protestantism. He despised Leicester. As a rule, he was ‘sparing’ in his ‘commendations’, as he said historians ought to be. Only heartfelt admiration ...”

“... is God’s own gift to the sifter of anecdotes and the historian of large-scale cultural change. Trevor Royle tackles it with affection and enthusiasm. Admirable as these qualities are, the reader might expect something substantial in return for an exposure to Royle’s eagerness. What does he get? Well, he gets a lot of misinformation. Precipitous City ...”

“... British history is very English: written mainly by the English and about England. But Trevor Burridge is a Welshman by birth and a citizen of Canada. He teaches at the French-speaking University of Montreal. One might expect, therefore, that he would bring to English history an outsider’s sense of disbelief, or the cheeky irreverence of an iconoclast ...”

“... is a long time to wait for the so-called ‘untold story’ of Passchendaele. Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson are Australian historians who tell us, a little loftily, that ‘Great War studies have yet to escape their protracted adolescence.’ Their adult investigation is reminiscent of those relentless inquiries into scams carried out by district ...”

“... ecstasy and impasse’ constitute by far the most interesting section of Windrush, Mike and Trevor Phillips’s history of postwar black England. Early arrivals who had been weaned on Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Dickens imagined the metropolis as ancient and archival. They had peered at celluloid images of its citadels and monuments on the Movietone ...”

“... Would it be any more or any less improper to pay someone for handing over a photograph of Prince William wearing a bikini? The court cases were scarcely covered by the Fleet Street newspapers, save to complain that they were taking place at all (the Daily Mail described Elveden as ‘a disgraceful attempt by police and prosecutors to intimidate ...”

“... through the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment. The Scots cleric and enlightened historian William Robertson traced the operation in human history of a superintending providence working indirectly through natural secondary causes: ‘The Supreme Being conducteth all his operations by general laws.’ Robertson’s famous sermon, The Situation of the ...”

“... as more significant ‘utopians’ than has been recognised. Dr Davis is also interesting on William Sprigge’s A Modest Plea for an Equal Commonwealth of 1659, the anonymous Chaos (1659) and The Free State of Noland (1696), which he classifies as ‘Harringtonian’. He has even found a couple of Royalist utopias, which he discusses in Chapter ...”

“... President – but don’t tell me the CIA did it.’ Roughly this attitude is expressed by Hugh Trevor-Roper, in an endorsement of Conspiracy, when he speaks of ‘uncontrolled US intelligence agents’. But are any of them controlled? I approached The Man Who Kept the Secrets with eagerness after an American friend who writes rather thoughtful spy stories ...”