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“... In this celebration of a possible Good Imperialist (good beyond the inherent virtues of failure), Charles Nicholl unearths more detail and offers more seductive speculation than any previous writer. With the vigorous Return of the Subject that besets many contemporary historians, he also can’t resist elbowing to the forefront with a Channel 4 expedition to ...”

“... protect the mainland’. McCartney has campaigned vociferously with Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson against the Agreement – in April, at the launch of the United Unionist campaign, he gave the clenched fist salute – and though most people regard him as a provincial politician, his policy of trying to make Northern Ireland permanently part of the ...”

“... coal mines. In the British view, India’s destiny was to remain what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson called in Why Nations Fail (2012) an ‘extractive colony’. The Raj was seen at its worst in the hardest times, responding to poor harvests and the resulting famines as reluctantly as the home government did in Ireland. The last large-scale famine in ...”

“... history’: a detailed study of the ways in which tattered texts that had belonged to one writer, Charles Lamb, won the passionate attention of American collectors and taught them new lessons about the hunt for old books.Broadway in the 1840s was already a hive of urban entertainments, from Niblo’s Garden theatre to P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, which ...”

“... authentic tone of enraptured and impotent yearning. Morton Cohen is, however, at pains to rescue Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (‘Lewis Carroll’) from this galère, and to present him as a well-rounded, sociable man, inspired by deep religious convictions, motivated by generosity and altruism towards his large family of brothers and sisters. His ‘...”

“... done much to rescue him from his popular reputation of Slippery Sam, ‘Old Peepy’, a mixture of Charles Pooler and Paul Pry, a natural target for clerihews (‘Sam Pepys, Gives one the crepys’) and the wags of 1066 and All That. If the diary had been seized and burned by the hangman his reputation need never have suffered, though he might well have been ...”

“... diversion on some alien visitor dropping in to have their theological doctrines explained to him. Charles Rowcroft’s ideal world in The Triumph of Woman (1848) is a drearily high-minded regime full of wholesome puddings, docile, state-funded artists and one pew per person in church. The space-travelling protagonist, who lands in Bavaria by ...”

“... one or another is bound to be in the audience. Besides, the solid diarists like Henry Crabb Robinson or Farington will have made an entry: if all else fails, Fanny Burney will have been told what went on at a first night by someone less squeamish in the choice of entertainment. And for a little filling-in of background information, there is always the ...”

“... When Robinson Crusoe tries to convey what it felt like to be the sole survivor of a shipwreck, he finds himself at almost as much of a loss now, in the telling, as he was then, gloomily pacing the shoreline of an uncharted and to all appearances inhospitable island; until, that is, objects come to his rescue. He cannot describe the ‘thousand gestures and motions’ he made, in his moment of crisis, without any hope of a response ...”

“... were somewhat grander than Tessimond’s. He was born in 1909 in Madras, the second son of Sir Charles Gordon Spencer, a high court judge there. After a series of threatening illnesses, he was sent back to England when only 18 months old to be brought up by relatives. Spencer and his siblings can have seen little of their parents, and in the poem ‘My ...”

“... problem of free choice.The Green pulpit can descend to quite low levels of abuse, but Marilynne Robinson’s Mother Country is witty as well as vicious. It combines ghoulish glee over the horrors of plutonium manufactured in Sellafield and dispersed along the Cumbrian coast, with satire against the quaint insincerities of the British. Her comic touch is so ...”

“... In all the stultifying discussion of Prince Charles’s fitness to grasp the orb and sceptre of kingship, there is one qualification that is almost never canvassed. I refer to his ability to give the annual Christmas broadcast to the Commonwealth. No light matter this – it was a dreaded annual penance for his grandfather – and made no lighter by his presumptive inability to end the chat by saying: ‘My wife and I ...”

“... huge glamour on the young ministers in Lemass’s government, especially on Lemass’s son-in-law Charles Haughey, who became Minister for Justice in 1961 and then Minister for Agriculture. There was something doomed about those men, the young princes of the Fianna Fail party jostling for power in the Sixties. Two of them – Kevin Boland and Neil Blaney ...”

“... Wilson increased Labour’s majority from four to 95 in 1966. Crossman’s predecessor, Kenneth Robinson, had appointed Howe to chair an inquiry into scandalous allegations, made in the News of thr World, of cruelty, torture and theft at Ely Hospital, a psychiatric institution near Cardiff. Howe’s final report had been submitted in September 1968, a month ...”

“... through to ‘government’ were taken almost verbatim from an act passed during the reign of Charles II, but the addition of the word ‘constitution’ had the advantage of introducing a term that could mean almost anything the crown lawyers might choose. It was clearly impossible to utter a syllable of discontent which they could not impute to a ...”