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“... Nancy met and married Waldorf Astor, who owned the Observer and was MP for Plymouth; his brother John owned the Times. The Astors were so rich that occasionally it embarrassed her: ‘My dear what do you think Mr Astor’ – her father-in-law William, later the first Lord Astor – ‘has done,’ she wrote to Phyllis. ‘Don’t breathe it even to Reggie ...”

“... difficulty of keeping one’s hat in place while performing the nine prostrations of the kowtow. John Bell, a Scottish doctor attached to a Russian embassy c.1720, didn’t enjoy the way sheep were cooked, but was fascinated by the acrobats and jugglers. He reckoned that Russia was the only nation with a fair chance of conquering China, though there ...”

“... years, who is spattered with ordure in The Dunciad; ‘stage-struck priests’ like the Rev. John Home, whose Douglas gave rise to a Scottish roar from the pit: ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ There is word of parsonical whorings and slayings, of deep draughts in taverns and stews; there are all manner of clerical bruisers, men like the Revds ...”

“... no 17th-century vernacular poet of this name is now recorded.’ But this is of course John Ogilby, the dancing-master turned voluminous poet, whom Pope repeatedly gives us licence to call ‘great’ (‘Here swells the shelf with Ogilby the great’ and ‘thy great fore-father, Ogilby’ in the Dunciad; Ogilby also ornaments MacFlecknoe). This ...”

“... Cathy leaves home to live in a squat, and Sheila manages through spirited perseverance to get her foot back in the door of Walton Lane. But the action of Present Times seems to be there less for itself than for the opportunity it provides for dialogue, and the book does not develop organically but through a string of set-piece arguments, mutual animadversions ...”

“... husband’s poems. In such cases writing does in a sense become a ‘genuinely social activity’. John Clare’s dealings with his publisher Taylor provide a variation on this theme. Clare’s peculiar circumstances resulted in revisions that were necessarily ‘social’, but modern editors have a persistent tendency to revert to the earliest unsocial ...”

“... Voorhees’s study is different. He highlights the all-important fact that in October 1962 John F. Kennedy was about to face congressional midterm elections. The results would determine the fate of his presidency, as well as his prospects for re-election in 1964. Kennedy’s New Frontier domestic agenda – which promised a huge house-building ...”

“... that had won the referendum by recasting the choice as one between the people’s will and a foot-dragging establishment, and hired Dominic Cummings, the architect of that strategy, to win a general election for him. He promised not only to get Brexit done, but to ‘level up’ the country in order to reward the constituencies that had voted for it, and ...”

“... militant ally in Britain, crossed to Torbay in November 1688 with a force of 4000 horse and 11,000 foot and marched on London – the last successful invasion of England. James, deserted by his generals at Salisbury, fled the country. Pretty much as had happened in 1660 before the reinstatement of Charles II, a parliament convened without a royal summons ...”

“... edges of the known world, medieval travellers encountered creatures who held a single giant foot over their head as a makeshift parasol and fearsome hybrids with eyes peering out from their chests or set in the middle of their foreheads: they were classed as wonders, close kin to the monsters and dragons of classical genealogies. When Thomas Browne was ...”

“... travel for ‘ladies’). This absence is exacerbated in the recent reprints, which have retained John Craxton’s characteristic cover designs, but omitted the arresting black and white photographs taken by Joan that were included in the first editions. Despite all this, Mani and Roumeli remain extraordinarily engaging books. This is partly thanks to Leigh ...”

“... shed light on the violent groups that peppered working-class communities and provided the foot soldiers for New York’s Democratic Party. Most subsequent accounts construed the Dead Rabbit-Bowery Boy Riot as the most violent in a string of battles between Irish and nativist gangs and an extension of the struggle between Mayor Wood and the politicians ...”

“... were also applied to discussions about politics, race and economic utility. Hegel never set foot in South America but described the Amazon as ‘monstrous’ and compared it unfavourably to the Mississippi Valley, which had allowed a harmonious civil society to take root. George Kennan, who did visit South America, used what he imagined to be the ...”

“... who had been killed by a Valmara or had stepped on a small pressure mine and was missing a foot or the lower part of a leg. I used to tell this story as an illustration of the resilience of ordinary Kurds in their long struggle against poverty and oppression. For almost a century the Kurds had been savagely treated: first by the British in the ...”

“... In the spring of 1974, as reports multiplied of his involvement with crooks such as John Poulson and T. Dan Smith, Reginald Maudling disappeared to Paris with his wife, Beryl. The Daily Mail’s Harry Longmuir had little difficulty locating him in the ‘Président’ suite of the George V. Checking in himself, Longmuir spent a whole Sunday morning with a confused, disorientated Maudling in his dressing-gown ...”