Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite

The general strike​ of 1926 poses three conundrums. Neither of the opposing parties – Britain’s mine-owners and Stanley Baldwin’s Tory government on one side, the miners and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) on the other – wanted a strike at the start of the year, and only the mine-owners had changed their minds three months later. So why did the strike happen at all?...

In late​ 2004, Boris Johnson cowered in a ‘cold, damp three-star hotel’ in Liverpool, worried that if he went outside he’d be attacked. He had embarked on what he called ‘Operation Scouse-grovel’, after the magazine he edited, the Spectator, published an (unsigned) editorial describing Liverpudlians as having ‘a peculiar, and deeply unattractive,...

In​ 1981, in the wake of a budget that slashed government spending amid a steep economic downturn, 364 academic economists signed a letter to the Times. ‘The time has come,’ it said, ‘to reject monetarist policies,’ since ‘there is no basis in economic theory or supporting evidence for the government’s belief that by deflating demand they will bring...

By​ 2014, Keir Starmer was tired of running up against the ‘limits of legal justice’. He had recently stepped down as director of public prosecutions when his local MP, Frank Dobson, announced his retirement. Starmer entered the race to replace him as the member for Holborn and St Pancras. He was a political unknown in a crowded field, facing past and present leaders of Camden...

Raphael Samuel​ adopted his notetaking method from Beatrice and Sidney Webb, progenitors of Fabian socialism, who developed it in the late 19th century:

Each thought or reference to a source was written or pasted onto a single side of a loose sheet of paper. It might be the source itself – an advertisement, a jam-jar label or an extract from a Xerox – it mattered only that it was...