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“... never been so low – certainly not since the 1640s and 1650s. ‘The House of Commons,’ Sydney Smith said in 1819, ‘is falling into contempt with the people.’ Taxes were high and times were bad, and journalists like William Cobbett were radicalising popular opinion by lambasting ‘Old Corruption’. Parliament, Cobbett stormed, was ruining the nation ...”

“... quantities of what they had originally gone there to find: precious metals. ‘Fortune,’ Adam Smith remarked dryly, ‘did upon this what she has done upon very few other occasions. She realised in some measure the extravagant hope of her votaries.’ The British (and the French), who had gone with the same extravagant hope, had come home ...”

“... what about Nelson?). The music halls rang to the words: ‘Nearly everyone knows me, from Smith to Lord Rosebery,/I’m Burlington Bertie from Bow.’ His daughter Peggy’s wedding drew crowds almost as big as for the queen’s jubilees. Thousands of spectators wore primroses as a gesture to the family name. The ...”

“... of their relations to each other. Hockney, in a recent radio conversation with Edward Lucie-Smith, drew attention to the marvellous painting of the mother teaching her child to walk. In the distortions of the mother’s face one sees all the anxiety and love a mother has for her child as he begins, literally, to move ...”

“... was published in 1948, Yvor Winters wrote a notice of it for the Hudson Review. Here Winters drew attention to Berryman’s ‘disinclination to understand and discipline his emotions’, and went on to suggest: ‘Most of his poems appear to deal with a single all-inclusive topic: the desperate chaos, social, religious, philosophical and ...”

“... Voltaire mildly said that the mid-17th century had been an ‘unfortunate’ time for monarchs: he drew attention to the deposition of the Ottoman Sultan Ibrahim, the destabilising of the Holy Roman Emperor, the flight of the young Louis XIV from Paris in the face of popular revolt, the trial of Charles I and Philip IV of Spain’s loss of Portugal and its ...”

“... should race against a former Kentucky Derby runner stabled in Pirtleville, in Arizona. As the day drew nearer, a foot-and-mouth outbreak made it impossible for either horse to be brought across the border. In those days the border fence at Douglas was not much higher than a sheep fence, and so the race went ahead in the autumn of 1958, with Relámpago running ...”

“... Linnaeus’s remarkable botanical collection, which was purchased for £1000 by James Edward Smith in 1783 and brought to London over the protest of all Swedish science. By the beginning of the Victorian era, the amateur tradition of the country naturalist and nature-appreciator – a tradition given great dignity and prestige by Gilbert White – had ...”

“... The comradely ‘bullpen’ of inky employees that he later encouraged Marvel readers to imagine drew on his memories of the early years. In reality, Goodman made him replace most of the staff with freelancers at the end of the 1940s, and a complicated distribution debacle led to another cull in 1957. Even then, those laid off rarely held it against Lee ...”

“... the poorest families best? They needed guides to take them around the districts. The first survey drew on the notes kept by School Board visitors who chased up children absent from the new ‘barrack’ state schools, and sometimes had the parents prosecuted (those unable to afford the few pennies for attendance were marked as paupers); later reports relied ...”

“... are reminded, ‘Malthus was as much the successor to Abraham Tucker and William Palcy as to Adam Smith, and as much the contemporary of someone like Bishop Sumner, who did so much to make his doctrines acceptable in Anglican circles, as of his friend Ricardo.’ Macaulay, on the other hand, is to be visualised, as he so often visualised himself, addressing ...”

“... left its mark on Motherwell’s writings. The editor of this collection suggests that Motherwell drew back from having the pieces collected during his lifetime because he felt the early ones argued the case for abstraction too defensively, and the later ones, risking more by way of self-revelation, were too like surrogates for art itself. What they show is ...”

“... still wider powers, in their age, of commercial, political, or other media interests. Authors who drew most attention to their own form and language – novelists such as John Berger, Doris Lessing, or Rushdie himself; poets such as J.H. Prynne – were in this way among the most politically committed in the period. Stevenson’s prejudices are strongly aired ...”

“... September 1982, the funeral of the senderista Edith Lagos, killed in a clash with security forces, drew a crowd of ten thousand onto the streets of Ayacucho, chanting such slogans as ‘The people will never forget spilled blood!’ Starting in 1983, responsibility for the counterinsurgency was transferred to the marines and the army; a large swathe of Peru ...”

“... his brand of reformed, rationalistic Judaism. Books and articles, meanwhile, attacked Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, as the ‘American Mahomet’, picturing him with harem wives, riding camels in the Utah desert. The​ most recent European version of Muhammad is the target of cartoonists whose work is seen as symbolising the value of free ...”