“... in a bottle of champagne or even a helicopter ride, and he had most definitely never received a brown envelope of any kind, but he had an allegiance to the party, because it was a tradition among his people, and he was a popular choice in the local council elections, out west, past Galway city towards Connemara, further than Beyond Barna and just shy of ...”

“... students, widespread racial harassment and unrepresentative, ethnocentric curricula. The statue of Edward Colston in Bristol was finally struck down after thirty years of campaigning.The murder​ of George Floyd in 2020 and the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement hastened the reckoning. Individual ‘heirs of slavery’ have apologised for the actions ...”

“... he did not lead marches. Some politicians became friends (he got the bus with Michael Foot; Gordon Brown was a dinner guest) and in the late 1970s and 1980s he would catalyse a fierce and consequential debate about the future of the Labour Party through interventions in Marxism Today (interventions that were blamed for – and that Hobsbawm later blamed ...”

“... to marry them. In Lichfield, the geographical centre of Middle England, a statue of Captain Edward John Smith of the Titanic stands in a park bestowing dangerous blessings on newly-wed couples emerging from the nearby register office. In McKie’s version of England the past is generally not allowed to assert itself as a moral yardstick, a measure of ...”

“... begun to feel like a weekly basis. More striking still, perhaps, are the new forms of support act. Edward Mendelson describes his critical study of Mrs Dalloway as a guide to the novel’s ‘inner life’. Mark Hussey’s is subtitled ‘Biography of a Novel’. What next for the literary masterpiece, one wonders. Birthday cards? A retirement gong?Daunted by ...”

“... court at Bow Street was on the ground floor of the Fieldings’ house and across the road from the Brown Bear, which became, as Beattie puts it, ‘a lock-up as well as a hang-out’ for the runners. They were expected to be ready to act at very short notice and most of them lived very near the court in the streets around Covent Garden, but hung out, when on ...”

“... that Labour could win majorities on its own after all. Inequality continued to climb on his and Brown’s watch. The banking crisis, which Labour failed to foresee and, arguably, helped facilitate, provided the excuse for Tory austerity, itself an excuse for dismantling the state. And, as Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley argue in their formidably ...”

“... books, collectors and readers. Every good secondhand bookshop offered guidance for neophytes: A. Edward Newton’s chatty books about his bookish adventures; Holbrook Jackson’s erudite Anatomy of Bibliomania, a comprehensive treatment of obsessive book-buying in the manner of Robert Burton; and sometimes even a copy of Carter and Pollard’s Inquiry into ...”

“... simply stamped out; with the Pre-Raphaelites, there was indeed such a potential – he cited Madox Brown’s house, where ‘there were not only artists but also atheists, political refugees, vagrants: there was the kind of widening which was questioning the order of a much wider area’ – and this did link to Morris’s development. But Williams could not ...”

“... The hair surrounding his bald skull had grown nearly gray. Zygmunt Salkin had a head of curly brown hair. He wore a blue suit with red stripes, a shirt of a similar pattern and a gaudy tie. He spoke an old-home Yiddish without the English words employed by the American tourists I had encountered in Warsaw. Still, I could determine from his speech that he ...”

“... want to keep private. The encomia at his memoir’s start evoke a picture of him as the Edward Snowden of his day: ‘No investigative journalist, before or since, has managed to reveal quite so many things that the [British] government wanted kept secret,’ writes Michael Goodman of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. And yet ...”

“... change is and will be everywhere. It doesn’t stand apart from our daily existence, not any more. Edward Struzik’s Firestorm is about the coming age of ‘megafires’ – wildfires covering an area of 100,000 acres or more. The phenomenon isn’t new, but megafires now occur with unprecedented frequency, and are uprooting more and more people from their ...”

“... in his lifetime than Keats, with whom he shared a publisher). Clare was discovered in 1819, when Edward Drury, a young Stamford bookseller, wrote to his cousin John Taylor, who was also a bookseller – what we would now call a publisher – and told him that he had discovered a wholly untutored genius: Your hopes of good grammar and correct verse, depend ...”

“... and Bazalgette’s death in 1891. Individual tunnels were named after members of the royal family. Edward, prince of Wales, and a train of courtiers, bishops and stakeholders in attendance, lifted their champagne flutes at the opening ceremony at Crossness. The pumping station was described as a Valhalla, with avenues of columns, lights and arches spreading in ...”

“... in Rothschilds before rising through the ranks of the Gaullist administration. A year later, Edward Heath succeeded Wilson, heading a Conservative government in a time of decolonisation. Unlike any other British prime minister of the postwar epoch, Heath was overwhelmingly oriented to Europe, where he had fought during the Second World War, rather than ...”