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“... HMS Glamorgan in the flight deck, killing 13 men, among them a young Naval lieutenant named David Tinker. His father, Hugh Tinker, has collected and edited David’s letters home. He has done so not just to make a memorial to his son, but to let a dead man testify: for both father and son came to believe that this was ...”

“... the church, he winds up the anecdote: ‘I did enjoy myself. I did like laughing. Tell wheezy old Hugh about that confessional.’ But on the whole he avoids Nancy Mitford’s habit of breaking off in mid-letter to make sure her correspondents are shrieking. Many of Betjeman’s letters, especially the earlier ones, use the apparatus of mirth – Oirish ...”

“... of my life.’ Cornwell agreed to co-operate with Sisman after reading his last book, a Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper. In an intriguingly cagey introduction, Sisman describes the resulting deal. Cornwell would give him long interviews, access to his archives, and a list of introductions. ‘I was to have a free hand to write what I wanted, provided that I ...”

“... Danny’s dad stuffs the raisins with sleeping pills then rakes in the snoozing birds; Little Hugh, another of Niall’s poaching mentors, spikes his bait with booze to get a similar result. I Walked by Night (1935), a memoir edited by Lilias Rider Haggard, situates the poacher in a rural-gothic social network of ‘smuglars’ and witches. Its ...”

“... while Hampstead proper attracted ‘more self-consciously intellectual’ politicians such as Hugh Gaitskell, Douglas Jay and Michael Foot. Here is unmasked the latent snobbery of the anti-suburbans. The great merit of the garden suburb is that it brought order, grace and amenity to something that would have happened anyway. True enough, the centres of ...”

“... us to reconstruct Early Modern family life. So Harrison reproaches his own profession, quoting Hugh Trevor-Roper to the effect that historians in general are great toadies of power. They could have written the history of the common people, but have chosen not to. ‘The historian shuts himself off from ever finding the common people as they saw ...”

“... how far revisionist histories – for all the acuity of their negative insights – have tended to tinker at the edges of existing stocks of positive knowledge, truffling in official holdings. Brenner’s book opens another world. No less striking is the way Merchants and Revolution restores narrative to the 17th-century crisis, on a grand scale. In principle ...”