“... survived, so many still to come); the post-traumatic shock of being allowed into the showpiece. King’s College, the part the grockles are never allowed to photograph (too squalid, these ranks of distressed vinyl chairs). It’s unreal: all these floaters drifting in from the street, straight past the uniforms, unmolested; an atmosphere of subdued ...”

“... In this the Government enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the Nationalist leader at Westminster, John Redmond, who made a dramatic recruiting speech at Wooden-bridge, County Wicklow in September 1914. Despite this, most Irish proved unwilling to die for what they were increasingly unsure was their country. By early 1916, only 48,315 Irishmen (excluding ...”

“... Latin and published, it becomes clear how strange the poet’s Christianity was. The poet is John Milton, and the work is De Doctrina Christiana.De Doctrina Christiana matters because it mattered to Milton. You can ignore it and still enjoy his poetry, but if you become seriously interested in Milton your interest will sooner or later extend to his ...”

“... In his book King Leopold’s Ghost, Adam Hochschild describes the stretch of the Congo River as it approaches the sea: Much of the Congo River basin, we now know, lies on a plateau in the African interior. From the western rim of this plateau, nearly a thousand feet high, the river descends to sea level in a mere 220 miles ...”

“... face lifted for the fourth time – the Doctors say no more), then Cecil [Beaton] and John Gielgud came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arturo Lopez’s yacht … Oh yes, I forgot Noel Coward – he fell in love with Jack. Jack hated it All. Later, in his thirties, he would tire also of the Greeks: ‘The children are so horrid: have ...”

“... Jamahiriyya, has ended badly. In contrast to the bloodless coup of 1 September 1969 that overthrew King Idris and brought Gaddafi and his colleagues to power, the combined rebellion/civil war/ Nato bombing campaign to protect civilians has occasioned several thousand (5000? 10,000? 25,000?) deaths, many thousands of injured and hundreds of thousands of ...”

“... in its exposure of the coming land-piracy that it seemed prophetic. It was efficiently directed by John MacKenzie, but the meat of the thing is in Barrie Keeffe’s script, his intimacy with tired ground that is about to be invaded, overwhelmed, rewritten. The advent of Margaret Thatcher was announced, as MacKenzie’s crime fable makes clear, by a slippery ...”

“... sent a letter to the Times condemning her economic policies (the signatories included Mervyn King, the future governor of the Bank of England). They wrote: ‘There is no basis in economic theory or supporting evidence for the government’s belief that by deflating demand they will bring inflation permanently under control and thereby introduce an ...”

“... I see his loving gaze falling on the objects in it: a conch shell on a side table, a painting by John Piper (a wedding gift). Home is never a neutral place, it is a very specific context, an animated expression of the presence it contains. Why can’t it be loved?‘You can’t love an inanimate object.’ I don’t know where he got the sentence from. My ...”

“... the lights finally asked her to leave. A letter in the New York Times on 23 December, from a Mr John E. Colbert in Chicago, defended the White House’s recent compromises: President Obama is a realist who gets things done: he makes his case, counts votes, makes his best deal and the country moves forward. That’s progress. He doesn’t gloat or count ...”

“... the rooftops of Sauchiehall Street might be Fyvie in Aberdeenshire, as drawn by Jessie M. King. For there is another character evident, one which so many of the visitors come to see: the sensuous, decorative excitement of the Art Nouveau. It is there in the treatment of the metalwork, in the tapering timber columns of the central first floor ...”

“... scenes occur in the great mining films of the early 1940s (Carol Reed’s The Stars Look Down, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley). Bernard soon leaves the mineshafts behind. His main interest lies in the ways in which the advent of the elevator transformed the design, construction and experience of high-rise buildings, and thus of modern urban life in ...”

“... Theory (1928), ‘calling higher or lower, celebrating a leader or a suggestion, honouring the king or some other person, or denying the acclamation by silence or complaining’. ‘Public opinion,’ he continued, ‘is the modern type of acclamation.’A host of new instruments were developed to capture this ‘modern type of acclamation’, though few ...”

“... river, like memory, full of people, places, ideas, things, all with an ambiguous reality status. King Kole, the Aboriginal cricketer, standing at the rail of the Paramatta, watching a pilot-boat butt its way across Gravesend Reach, knew he had arrived at the Land of Death. Gravesend did for Pocahontas, the Indian princess, too: she died there, on her way ...”

“... could not be ‘equal’ if it was also ‘separate’, through a decade of Martin Luther King’s non-violent marches, boycotts and sit-ins against Southern segregation, American Presidents were forced at last to pay serious attention to the African American. If Eisenhower was reluctant and Kennedy visionary, it was Lyndon Johnson who turned black ...”