“... were, to a lad, left out. In the summer the British Art Show arrived in London. In the meantime, Peter Fuller had died in a car crash. Fuller never lived to type out the words ‘Damien Hirst’. He died before the Turner Prize began to favour younger artists, before Saatchi started collecting the new art of the Nineties. But his is still a spectral presence ...”

“... about materialism which is not itself materialist?’ Well, one answer to that might be to read another of Hall’s Marxism Today essays, published a year before the New Times project began: ‘When the left talks about crisis, all we see is capitalism disintegrating, and us marching in and taking over … [But] there is no law of history which can ...”

“... with himself. 17 January. At the Annual General Meeting of the Friends of the British Library I read (rather haltingly) a piece I’ve written about the libraries I’ve worked in, including the Round Reading Room at the old Public Record Office in Chancery Lane. The memoranda rolls on which I spent most of my time were long, thin swatches of parchment ...”

“... of object and forms of illustration. In one of the first appearances of the poem the opening line read as ‘Many ingenuous lovely things are gone’. I don’t really doubt that ‘ingenuous’ is the misprint most scholars think it is, but then it’s a fortunate slip, a sort of Freudian message from the printer’s font. The ‘things’ that are gone are ...”

“... playing a kind of burlesque version of themselves. These are men like the braggadocio Peter Shakerly; the railer Charles Chester, who was the model for Carlo Buffone in Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour; Humfrey King, the poetic tobacconist; the barber-surgeons Tom Tooley and Richard Lichfield; the tavern joker John Stone. These loquacious ...”

“... bodies could not be reassembled, bones picked from the mud. ‘The government of the time,’ Peter Ashley wrote in his English Heritage booklet, Lest We Forget (2004), ‘refused to acknowledge the concept of the repatriation of the dead, so these monuments became the focal points for grief.’ The fallen of King’s Cross are uniformly capitalised: a ...”

“... as bright, will not mind my saying on behalf of several thousand subscribers that the piece was read keenly. If the editor didn’t print it just as keenly, certainly he managed to overcome his reluctance. But it can’t be denied that the adversarial casting of reviewer and reviewed is more commonly practised down at the tattier end of Grub Street to ...”

“... concerning them manage to be as much about Schoenberg as anything else. Robert Simpson and Peter Maxwell Davies are given such occluded treatment that one might be forgiven for not recognising them at all. But it is the holes that I deplore. Bach is a pious shadow rather than a solid substance; the rest of the Baroque is altogether absent. So are whole ...”

“... scripts of the earliest Middle Ages, with a sleek and limpid Caroline minuscule that anyone can read today after a few minutes’ practice. More than two-thirds of the ancient Latin literature we have today was in circulation under Charlemagne’s heirs in the ninth century, and not much that enjoyed a Carolingian revival was subsequently lost. But the ...”

“... New York Times thought the most charitable speculation was that it had been ‘dictated but never read, neither by the former prime minister nor by his publishers’. After​ the brief and futile interlude of James Callaghan’s premiership, a new Tory prime minister entered Downing Street in May 1979. Almost thirty years before, at the 1950 general ...”

“... although he doesn’t know if the Medici (to one of whom, Lorenzo, The Prince is dedicated) had read Machiavelli’s book, ‘they grabbed the principality of Florence, and turned the republic into a duchy.’ The stage was set for Machiavelli as a republican cacodemon too devious for his own good. In Elizabethan and Jacobean drama ‘Machiavel’ was ...”

“... Lorem ipsum font-sample text first used by Letraset in the 1960s, but once by far the most widely read and influential of all ancient philosophy in the West. Sometimes the introduction of the material is straightforward, even clunky: ‘I came across that passage in one of his speeches’; ‘Cicero quickly dictated a final message to his wife and ...”

“... who was responsible for the ridiculing of his father? Seventeenth-century clergymen such as Peter Heylyn veered between embracing the racial version of this story and dismissing it as ‘a foolish tale’. (Heylyn did both, at different moments in his life.) Some 19th-century commentators tripped on the awkward question of how stuffy old Noah had become ...”

“... what makes his book especially interesting is how he came to know what he claims to know. He has read everything on the Afghan insurgency and the civil wars that followed, and has been given access to the original manuscript of Robert Gates’s memoir (Gates was director from 1991 to 1993), but his main source is some two hundred interviews conducted between ...”

“... innovate only because they already knew a great deal about what was expected of them. They could read the signals, and decipher the signs, in large public gatherings; above all, they knew how to follow a lead. ‘What is needed,’ Ober writes, ‘is a body of decision makers capable of recognising (through social knowledge) who really is expert, and capable ...”