“... it happens inwhat else happens in that country                                (‘North American Time’)Her essays employ an argot that contemporary opinion pieces might have cribbed from: ‘The creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out; what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction.’ ‘“Identity” became a synonym ...”

“... give away a million boys’ lives in blood and pain’. Senators from Idaho, Montana and North Dakota called for her to be investigated as a ‘British agent’. How else to explain her comment, during the Battle of Britain, that if ‘democracy perishes in Britain, it will not be because the British people did not fight Hitler with all they had; it ...”

“... and has the ninth largest economy – who grew up not just working-class but poor. His biographer John French points out that Lula learned to read when he was ten, didn’t always have enough to eat, left school at twelve, and came from the impoverished, stigmatised north-east of the country, with the accent to prove ...”

“... a police raid. (She had taken part in the kidnapping of the American ambassador to Guatemala, John Gordon Mein, who was killed while trying to escape.) Kaminsky was disgusted by extreme left-wing groups like the Red Army Faction and their ‘bloody methods of urban guerrilla warfare’. He had also concluded that French security forces were following ...”

“... 1505, she grew up, probably, on her father’s estates in Essex. Jane’s mother was Alice St John, daughter of a Bedfordshire landowner. Her father was Henry, Lord Morley, the scholarly translator of Petrarch and Plutarch. David Starkey begins an essay on Lord Morley by wondering whether we should class him like Prufrock as an ‘attendant ...”

“... into a term of abuse. Chu, a BBC journalist of Chinese descent brought up in the North of England, is an acute guide, both to the historical resonances and the present economic realities, which leave even the most cocksure of us breathless and not a little baffled. We might start at the very least by looking further back beyond the 1930s, to ...”

“... annual stipend so he could concentrate on his poetry, only to commit suicide two years later; to John Quinn, a lawyer and collector to whom T.S. Eliot gave the manuscript of The Waste Land; to James Laughlin, founder and editor of New Directions (or Nude Erections as Pound liked to call it); to Alice Corbin Henderson of Poetry; to Scofield Thayer and James ...”

“... as a poet. ‘It is all a battle,’ he announced to his friend and partner in art, the painter John Minton. He and Dunsmuir lived in conditions of spectacular inconvenience: a poky caravan for some years and later a cottage to which the word ‘spartan’ doesn’t really do justice – ‘a leaking roof, no cooking stove, no electricity, an outside toilet ...”

“... to the ‘kitchen sink’ allegedly installed somewhere in the house. Novels by Stan Barstow, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey and others framed stories told from the point of view of an aspiring and/or truculent working-class protagonist, often Northern, usually but not always male, as a Bildungsroman or novel of moral and sentimental ...”

“... defender of the Bosnian cause, or at least its dedicated mourner. He has written a polemic against John Major’s Government and David Owen, the EU mediator in the remains of Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1995, for their connivance in the ferocious dismantling of Bosnia-Herzegovina. He is keen on Major’s New Labour successors, and confident that Tony Blair’s ...”

“... example, author, with her husband, of My Boy Jack? The Search for Kipling’s Only Son (1998). (John Kipling died in his first half-hour in action – at the age of 18 – at Loos in 1915. Though his stricken father carried on a 20-year search for his grave, his remains were not found until 1992.) When not writing, the Holts run a sprightly operation known ...”

“... Hania (right) On Monday, 12 June, Rania and Naseem went to the Sainsbury’s by the canal at the north end of Ladbroke Grove. They went from there to the Westway Centre off Portobello Road; that was where Rania took English classes (she had the best attendance) and she was due to graduate that day so they went there and met up with their friend Muna ...”

“... by Herodotus and Pliny, whose existence, apparently validated by the traveller’s tales of John Mandeville, haunted the medieval imagination, including that of Columbus? If they were in fact rational human beings, in the full sense of these words, why had they never heard of the Christian gospel, which, it was assumed, had been preached to the ends of ...”

“... and fortifications along the Rhine and Danube, was mirrored at the edge of the desert in North Africa by a defensive line, called ‘the ditch’ (fossatum), behind which fortified villas provided a defence in depth. In the Near East, where Roman authority gradually bled away into the fastnesses of the Syrian and Jordanian steppe, the concept of a ...”

“... parliamentarians are a socially conformist bunch: they shopped for furniture and fabrics at John Lewis, Harrods, Laura Ashley, Heal’s, the House of Fraser, Debenhams, Habitat, IKEA, BoConcept and OKA; when looking for deals they went to Argos, Currys, Comet, Marks & Sparks, B&Q and Woolworths, until it closed. They love their gardens, and spent ...”