“... version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, The Jazz Singer, and David O. Selznick’s 1939 super-production Gone with the Wind ‘provide the scaffolding for American film history’ – although it takes us no further than the eve of the Second World War. This reading of Hollywood is anticipated by Leslie Fiedler’s ...”

“... lesson in ingenuity and hard work crowned by success after success. By the time he died he held 1093 patents across an extraordinary range of endeavour, for telegraphy, telephony, electricity, acoustics, cement housing, artificial pearls, the forerunner of the mimeograph and a way of getting electricity from coal. He also left five million pages of ...”

“... had built her own Shakespearean shrine-cum-reading-room in 1742 – more than a decade before David Garrick commissioned what had previously been considered the first Temple of Shakespeare, complete with a statue by Roubiliac, for his own garden at Hampton – made me sufficiently curious to want to renew my attempt to see her former house and ...”

“... soon gave up on that idea. In any case, her particular skills – rapid-fire dialogue and just-held-back sentiment – were better suited to the newest game in town: talking pictures. Parker had spent most of the 1920s pronouncing her aversion to the movies (‘any motion-picture theatre is as an enlarged and magnificently decorated lethal chamber to ...”

“... at the dilapidated Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield. The officer in charge, chief superintendent David Duckenfield, was grossly underprepared. When a crush developed at the entrance for Liverpool fans shortly before kick-off, Duckenfield refused to delay the start time, but belatedly opened one of the exit gates, letting fans flood into the Liverpool ...”

“... I was there, at seven o’clock one March morning, a small area of a vast concrete-floored shed held rows of yellow boxes filled with fish packed on crushed ice: cod longer than my arm, skate like kites made of mangled flesh, the astonished eyes of haddock. Porters, buyers and auctioneers milled around in white coats and hats and yellow wellies, bidding for ...”

“... of competition is that there are winners and losers. The electricity competition has now been held. It is over, and Britain lost. From the point of view of technology and capital, electric Britain is no longer a centre. It is another centre’s province. The most unexpected consequence of selling the country’s electric legacy, the consequence that most ...”

“... on its relative merits, as one idiom among others. This in turn cast doubt on the long story that held us together, with its passage through the Enlightenment to liberal democracy, Europe’s unique discovery, which it meant to hand down across the generations. Identity too was an issue, if people could move fluently between one and another ...”

“... his way immediately to Iseult’s house. She was later arrested for harbouring him briefly and held for a month before being found not guilty. By the time Fisk’s book came out I was no longer seeing much of Francis and Madeleine. In 1982, we had printed a letter about Stuart’s column which accused him of having been a Nazi supporter. On the morning In ...”

“... palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment. At the same time, the story of Libya in 2011 gives ...”

“... by something squalid that squats ‘lookin’ up at ’im, you see’. But he dies a vertical man, held upright by some obscure passionate intensity, almost a principle. The only function of the other figure is to look up to this dreadful but memorable intensity. To identify him (let alone her, let alone to make the body that of Mrs Bathurst) will only ...”

“... administrative system during the Second World War. In the spring of 1945, a conference was held in San Francisco to set up the United Nations. It hadn’t originally been scheduled to discuss a separate body for health, but a Chinese medic and diplomat’s son called Szeming Sze managed to push it onto the agenda, where it was overwhelmingly ...”

“... in the 1960s a fighter in the underground against the military dictatorship, who had never held or run for electoral office before. With Lula at her side, she coasted to victory with a 56 per cent majority, the first woman to win the presidency. Initially better received by a middle class that detested Lula, for two years she enjoyed quite widespread ...”

“... families. This budget helps hardworking people keep more of the money they have earned. His boss, David Cameron, criticising Labour in Parliament last month: They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais, they said they could all come to Britain. The only people they never stand up for are the British people and hardworking taxpayers. The former Conservative ...”

“... out a substantial and authoritative History of Irish Women’s Poetry, edited by Ailbhe Darcy and David Wheatley. A new genealogy of Irish poetry that doesn’t foreground Yeats or Kavanagh but Katharine Tynan and Máire Mhac an tSaoi has come into view.Deane reacted promptly to protests about The Field Day Anthology by commissioning two volumes of women’s ...”