“... himself. Abstract art couldn’t deliver a symbolic charge to match that of Constable or Turner, he complained in 1936. He summarised his change of heart a year later in an essay tellingly entitled ‘Lost, a Valuable Object’. ‘It will be a good thing to get back to the tree in the field that everyone is working for … Get back to it as fact, as ...”

“... study of a Renaissance playwright, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, such a page-turner – a book about the Mountjoys will have to do. But is there really a whole book to be made out of this tiny overlap between the life of our greatest playwright and the domestic squabbles of a family of French expatriate head-dressers? The Belott-Mountjoy ...”

“... As Lahav says, Meir must have been aware of the work of the Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner, whose ‘frontier thesis’ saw settler colonialism as a defining feature of American progress. In May 1921, Meir and Morris travelled from New York to Italy on the USS Pocahontas. On a second boat from Brindisi to Egypt, they fell in with some Lithuanian ...”

“... Southern Reconstruction governments, a national railroad strike, and the annihilation of General George Armstrong Custer and his men by warriors of the Lakota Sioux and other Native American nations (Custer’s Last Stand). Each was seen as a battle in which more primitive people stood in the way of national progress. Increasingly, divisions along the lines ...”

“... was brought up by his paternal grandparents, while Crippen ‘turned his sights east’. Cora Turner, born Kunegunde Mackamotzki, and later to restyle herself as Belle Elmore, was the daughter of a hard-up German immigrant family in Brooklyn. She had an (illegal) abortion, aged eighteen, after her domestic employer got her pregnant. Dr ...”

“... of paying people to scrap their cars, we might as well burn ten-pound notes in power stations,’ George Monbiot told the BBC. Some of the firms the incentive scheme is intended to help have been afraid the move would leave them out of pocket. Honda, Ford and Vauxhall have been reluctant to take part. But however doubtful industry experts have been, 35,000 ...”

“... he wasn’t romantically interested in her – seducing a string of famous pin-ups including Lana Turner, Norma Shearer and Ava Gardner, who became his first wife. ‘Who wouldn’t want to go out with me?’ Rooney asked. ‘I had my own car, I had some nickels in my pocket and I was somebody.’Being ‘somebody’ didn’t come with the same benefits for ...”

“... George Osborne​ gets booed at the London Olympics. Suella Braverman cracks gags during her visit to a half-built asylum detention centre in Rwanda. Boris Johnson is illegally presented with a birthday cake. A Tory staffer throws up as the exit poll drops. David Cameron keeps his bladder full all night to achieve maximum focus during EU negotiations ...”

“... business in Oxford Street’.Admirers of Morris the revolutionary have shared his uncertainties. George Bernard Shaw thought Morris’s late-life addiction to scribbling prose romances a lowering hobby – why not take up making musical instruments instead? When Morris’s former secretary Sydney Cockerell trekked to Yasnaya Polyana, he was disappointed to ...”

“... impossible to imagine Altamont or Live Aid, Michael Jackson on the Thames, Bono cold calling George Bush mid-gig, Katy Perry in orbit. No personal touchscreen beckoning itchy fingers. Just gazing dreamily into the distance or cycling about aimlessly on long summer afternoons. Boredom and its cloud-drift antidotes. Boredom as something almost ...”

“... meant something. In Wojas’s day, the idea of a radical act was to enter the whole club for the Turner Prize.There were certain especially instructive figures, among them Julian Maclaren-Ross, denizen of Fitzrovia, not least because his travails forever appeared to eclipse his talent. Although he was a very good writer indeed, the question of how he looked ...”

“... the stern rose in the water, four great propellers could be clearly discerned. Then she was gone. George Henderson was only six at the time. ‘I can still sit here now,’ he told a TV crew in 1994, ‘and see that great liner just sliding below the waves.’ The Lusitania, launched by Cunard in June 1906 to wrest transatlantic traffic back from the ...”

“... gave up his original plan of a career in the Church, also knew William Godwin and Coleridge. George, the only one of the brothers whose portrait survives, has a look of the latter about him with his long hair and slightly abstracted gaze. All the brothers travelled widely and spoke and read several languages. When they were at home they entertained ...”

“... detected a fellow-traveller of the Calvinist International in the 16th-century polymath George Buchanan, an Erasmian humanist who went on to adopt the cladding of Scots Calvinism at its most dour, but without, it appeared, possessing any of the inner belief. Buchanan – in later life the bloodthirsty but effective tutor of the young James VI ...”

“... hand. It is a baguette. Later, after the Germans have started bombing the British forces, Robbie Turner sees, across a field, the head of a fellow soldier, resting on the soil. McEwan doesn’t need to say what we are thinking, that he has been decapitated. As Robbie approaches, he sees that the soldier is not dead, but knee-deep in a grave he is digging for ...”