“... of conviviality and general bonhomie enveloped the gathered crowds.’ Not always. On New Year’s Eve 1811, several New Town gentlemen were relieved of their valuables and a widely despised police watchman was beaten to death by Old Towners. The violence was blamed on gangs (which were certainly involved) and the corrupting influence of prostitutes. In the ...”

“... been a byword for enduring monumentality, and some of the items on display in the Royal Academy’s exhibition Bronze (until 9 December) are 5700 years old, apparently. They are a small selection from a hoard of ceremonial objects with animal motifs found wrapped in a reed mat in a cave near the Dead Sea in the 1960s. Other bronze objects fell out of boats ...”

“... As the Conservative Party in the country clearly favoured Clarke, the Parliamentary Party’s gratuitous act of unilateral leadership disarmament was, so far as I know, the only occasion in the 20th century when either the Conservative or the Labour Party in Parliament was more extreme than its members in the ...”

“... Lynda Nead​ ’s new study of the ways in which postwar Britain was represented by what was not yet called its media is tirelessly oblique. She contrives to see everything through the reductionist lenses of colour and colourlessness. She leans heavily on Raymond Williams’s notion of a ‘structure of feeling’ which supposedly defines the ‘particular and characteristic colour of a period ...”

“... for entering a ‘white’ station waiting room, he spent his 20th birthday at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Penitentiary. Like Lewis, Carmichael venerated King, but by 1966 he was ready to abandon King’s pacifistic integrationism in favour of militant black nationalist rhetoric.In May 1966, Lewis was initially ...”

“... president to prime minister and then back again, it is not exactly smoke and mirrors stuff. It’s just out one door and in through another. He doesn’t care that no one is fooled. This is how oligarchies work: the people at the top care much more about their dealings with each other than their dealings with the public. It is also the reason oligarchies ...”

“... and women, dressed more brightly than anyone else: the vegetable dyes of the period faded quickly, so that colour was a mark of status. Purple was the royal colour, forbidden to others, but reds and greens were popular. The richer the person, too, the better the quality of the cloth (wool, linen, silk), the more elaborate the lace of collars and cuffs, the ...”

“... the defence of an implicitly white conception of French identity, from growing into the country’s largest political force. In the absence of statistical data, centrist governments and administrative services cannot respond to claims of discrimination. Above all, it is hard not to feel angry about the hypocrisy surrounding the issue, since in private the ...”

“... A special 25th anniversary edition of Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Consensus was published in March. Harvard University Press are advertising it together with Richard Lewontin’s new book, The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, Environment, presumably to let everyone know they’re not taking sides ...”

“... of object, including buildings and sculpture as well as products for domestic use. Thus Venice’s industrial and mercantile strength, rather than its flourishing artistic tradition, made it a centre of the European trade in colours. The current exhibition at the National Gallery, Making Colour (until 7 September), illustrates the characteristics and use by ...”

“... was first shown in 2005 and immediately became a defining shape of its time. Partly, the dress was so successful because it was strict and yet curve-friendly, making it easy to look nice in. It had in it a tension and a contradiction. The cleverness of the tailoring, the 3D precision of the darts and seaming, always makes me think about the concave angles they ...”

“... Shortly before the invasion of Iraq, George Bush’s economic adviser, Larry Lindsey, estimated that the war would cost $200 billion. ‘Baloney,’ Donald Rumsfeld fumed, offering a figure of $50-60 billion, some of which he said would be supplied by America’s friends. Andrew Natsios, the head of the Agency for International Development, told Ted Koppel on Nightline that postwar Iraq could be rebuilt for $1 ...”

“... a highly laconic and perfected style he gives such a clear and accurate description of the piano’s characteristics that it is all I can do not to give it in full. Heinrich Neuhaus, The Art of Piano Playing I quote too much. Give me a good line – what am I saying? Give me a good paragraph – even a Proustian one – and I’ll shove it into my own prose ...”

“... biographies and Alan Franks, in the Times magazine of 31 March, talking of Blake Morrison’s South of the River coming out ‘just as Blair contemplates his awful decline from resourceful young bushytail to mangy endgame quarry’. But however much future historians may discover which is unknown to the commentators of the present day, and however right ...”

“... lookout, in line with the crannog, the tiny island fort, in the estuary below, but the fact it’s not circular, the way it’s set into the lee of the hill, makes me think it must be an old stone cabin, how old I don’t know, but it would have been inhabited by Gaelic speakers who cut hay on the two hidden meadows ...”