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“... the mystery and miracle of his existence. In his excellent book on the Russian Revolutionary novel Richard Freeborn discusses the many forerunners of Dr Zhivago, and implies, what is certainly the case, that the novels which had sought to come to terms with the new world of the Revolution – Fedin’s Cities and Years, Veresaev’s The ...”

“... and raped, usually without the culprit being brought to justice. Some fared better than others: Richard Ligon, a royalist fugitive to Barbados, observed that much depended on the master. Tender-hearted men gave servants work ‘as is not unfit for Christians to do’; but the cruel ones made their lives ‘very wearisome and miserable’.More than a few ...”

“... between demography and prosperity. Population was a controversial subject. The radical philosopher Richard Price had been convinced in the 1770s that Britain’s population was shrinking fast, with dire consequences for national wellbeing. Thomas Malthus was equally convinced that the opposite was true, making that case in his Essay on the Principle of ...”

“... Shakespearean actor Edwin Forrest (1806-72), a man described by his admiring modern biographer Richard Moody as ‘the first actor who refused to subscribe to the nation’s cultural inferiority complex’. As The Shakespeare Riots makes clear, however, Forrest was sufficiently affected by this inferiority complex to have spent much of his life telling the ...”

“... In April​ 2022, Justin Trudeau watched Richard Baker, the 39th governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, hand over ownership of its ornate department store in Winnipeg to the local First Nations. The ceremonial was Hanoverian, with Baker and Grand Chief Jerry Daniels trading pelts and a gold coin, but the rhetoric was that of postcolonial reconciliation ...”

“... was predictable, too, that the heroes of the social history of the Sixties and Seventies – the freeborn Englishman and his protests, the class-conscious working man, the unruly Briton who could only be pushed so far – would lose some of their immediate appeal. For much of the Eighties, the British have not seemed a markedly disorderly people; nor have ...”

“... recording of ‘God Save the King’ and other patriotic anthems. ‘Not surprisingly’, Richard Weight remarks in Patriots, the convoy ‘got a muted reception when it parked in the ruins of Berlin’. In France, the bus crews were treated to mayoral banquets, only for their leader to complain about the ‘strange dishes’ which weren’t ‘up to ...”

“... but I feel gratified somehow by the idea of beating bureaucracy, of asserting the right of every freeborn Englishman to fiddle his expenses. At Aeroflot, Jenny is out to lunch. It is 4.40. Finally, at 4.50, she appears. The manager has the tickets. He is out to lunch and his office is locked. Then it transpires that he has given the tickets to another ...”