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“... of Communism reported by former believers; Rabbi Stephen Wise addressing an anti-Nazi rally; John Galsworthy’s protest about planes being used for war – ‘For the love of the sun, and stars and the blue sky, that have given us all our aspirations since the beginning of time, let us leave the air to innocence!’ ‘The guiding principle,’ says ...”

“... became a solid citizen. He compensated for his middle-aged foibles by service as churchwarden, constable and, in another unremarked irony, overseer of the poor. He was buried in ‘Friends’ ground’ by his Quaker wife in 1676. Contemporaries were not much taken with the Diggers, or True Levellers as they sometimes preferred to call themselves. ‘A ...”

“... as he is about the costs of the Falklands, or the welfare of the Polish Government. Like Mr Foot, John Rentoul of the New Statesman has contributed some crucial articles – turning-points in the affair. David Leigh of the Observer wrote on 6 January 1985, ‘The intercepted Argentine signals were decoded and telexed at the time directly to Navy HQ at ...”

“... the real-life Rochester, Alexander Larman provides a workmanlike account of an improvident life. John Wilmot was born in 1647 on All Fools’ Day. His father, one of Charles II’s most stalwart lieutenants, had fought for the king and fled the field with him after the royalist defeat at the battle of Worcester. The two men escaped together to Paris, where ...”

“... who are closest to national politicians to strike the right balance,’ Tim Brain, a former chief constable of Gloucestershire, told Harper. ‘It’s easy if you are chief constable of Gloucestershire to provide some distance. You are not cheek by jowl with these people. But in order to get some of the top jobs you have to ...”

“... in which the King’s Secretary issued a warrant authorising two messengers to enter the home of John Entick and search for seditious papers. There was neither common law nor statutory authority for this action, which Entick successfully challenged in the courts, recovering damages from the hapless messengers (said to be ‘as much responsible as their ...”

“... more often acknowledged than explored. Fox’s concern is the imaginative literature of the age of John Skelton and Thomas More, and then of Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey: literature which he believes to have been gravely undervalued, and which he commends not only for its intrinsic pleasures but as a rich historical source. What the most ...”

“... in a tradition of Scottish eccentricity that includes James Hogg’s The Shepherd’s Calendar, John Galt’s ‘theoretical histories’ and Margaret Oliphant’s tales of terror. It’s common to think of Blackwood’s as a stolid redoubt of middlebrow English respectability, the kind of torpid organ invoked by Orwell in ‘England Your England’: ‘If ...”

“... Williams), only two (named) amateurs have been deemed worthy of representation in the show: John White Abbott, the remarkably faithful imitator of his teacher Francis Towne, and the Reverend William Gilpin, who merits such exceptional treatment solely on account of his work as a leading theorist of the picturesque (in fact, Gilpin didn’t produce ...”

“... Lisle gave Anne Boleyn a monkey in 1534, she wasn’t pleased. ‘As to touching your monkey,’ John Hussee wrote to Lisle the following year, ‘of a truth, madam, the queen loveth no such beasts nor can scarce abide the sight of them.’ What happened to the monkey isn’t clear. One hopes Anne didn’t do to it what Samuel Pepys did to his pet monkey in ...”

“... remained – but the style of commitment was transformed. On New Year’s Day 1839, the Rev. John Rayner Stephens spoke to a Chartist rally on Newcastle’s Town Moor. There were about forty thousand angry people at the meeting. Stephens declared himself ‘a revolutionist by fire, a revolutionist by blood, to the knife, to the death’. If the hated new ...”

“... as a way of allowing honourable men to stay in office without appearing to want to do so. John Nott offered his resignation after the Falklands invasion but he allowed himself to be persuaded by Mrs Thatcher to stay in office. William Whitelaw has written that he wanted to resign as Home Secretary after an intruder had entered the Queen’s bedroom in ...”

“... covering the case of a teenage boy who had been beaten up by a policeman in Thurso, which is near John o’Groats. There was the most fearful hullabaloo based on the belief that this sort of thing could only happen in the wilderness of the Far North. The press demanded that this errant policeman be brought to justice. There was a similar furore a year or two ...”

“... If they remind Catholics to keep Clear of Republicanism, killings like these can be useful, as John Taylor, an MP from the ‘respcetable’ side of Unionism and a Minister of Home Affairs in the days of Stormont, has acknowledged. Another Stormont MP, now very happily deceased, took the logic of his strong feelings about Northern Catholics a stage ...”

“... They began by suspecting we should make our fortunes by selling their children as slaves.’ Any constable trying to arrest a Shipham man was likely to be thrown into one of the pits. Still, these ‘lawless’ people had ‘a worthy curate’ whom they respected, though they didn’t agree with him, and in one of the villages a poor farmer’s daughter had ...”