“... the aftermath of Castle Bravo, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb that was exploded over Bikini in 1954, John Anjain, a magistrate from nearby Rongelap, reported that ‘women gave birth to creatures that did not resemble human beings: some of the creatures looked like monkeys, some like octopi, some like bunches of grapes.’A little ...”

“... in vacuous sycophancy and ‘informed’ gossip. In those days Northampton was apparently in the North, and Milton Keynes was a bastion of Middle England. The Firm was yet to be struck by emotional incontinence and an embarrassing appetite for candid outpouring. No one yet needed to tell them to keep their traps shut. Brown’s faintly proprietorial ...”

“... rhymes. Thapar got him to read ‘The British’ by Benjamin Zephaniah and ‘Half-Caste’ by John Agard. Jhemar was surprised to hear Thapar describe himself as ‘mixed-race’; he’d only heard Black people use the term.Thapar is honest about his mistakes. When a teenager was murdered near the community centre and TV crews descended, his first ...”

“... the tremendous pressures of poverty and exploitation in the South into the arena of the North’ – there could emerge a new and far-reaching agenda for reconstruction. Liberalism also was long occluded, but is now again, in name, triumphant. ‘Oblivion, transvaluation, mutation, redemption: each, according to their intuition, will make their own ...”

“... of the family was commandeered by the terrible young Saint-Just, commissioner to the armies of the North. Yourcenar admits: ‘Like a number of French men and women of my generation, I worshipped Saint-Just when I was very young.’ She had liked to fancy that her great-great-grandmother fell in love with the handsome revolutionary: later the author’s ...”

“... back, Spartacus, Moses and even Robin Hood were played by Americans, while Nero, Pharoah, King John and the Sheriff of Nottingham had British accents. To use an American for the hero was only natural, but the hiring of Britons to play a specifically political kind of villain says something particular: namely, that American mythology has quite sharply ...”

“... of ‘common sense’. Gish singles out for praise the ‘precise nature images’ of the ‘North of the Tweed’ section: but the images need to be seen in context, they point beyond immediate perception to the more subtle movements of cosmic processes. But this rejection of the merely concrete, in MacDiarmid as in Shelley, need not be read as simple ...”

“... British press, but may not much belong to its future. To a grammar-school boy growing up in the North of England forty years ago, the press was an honourable estate. At the centenary of the birth of C.P. Scott, The Making of the ‘Manchester Guardian’ was an ideal anthology for a sixth-form prize on Speech Day. Here were Scott’s ...”

“... material about ‘the corrupt nexus at the heart of the Russian state’. He cites a report by John Beyrle, the US ambassador to Moscow, who wrote that ‘police and MVD collect money from small businesses while the FSB collects from big businesses.’ But even when they amiably divide up the turf, the members of various agencies are doing so for their own ...”

“... to similar conclusions about the counter-revolutionary value of pluralism. And in the Old South, John Calhoun formulated his theory of concurrent majorities – an already fragmented society would be further fragmented by the near impossibility of the national government’s taking concerted action on behalf of the majority – as a counter to the ...”

“... all those forms in turn before expiring. Almost all of them, from Tolosa (the Visigoth kingdom north of the Pyrenees) to ‘CCCP’ (Davies’s jokey way of referring to the Soviet Union, in a chapter which is almost exclusively about Estonia), are shown to be memorable. The Davies technique is to divide each chapter into three: a lively journal of his own ...”

“... mother bombarded him with advice; his tutor at Cambridge was the future archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift; and his godfather, the Earl of Bedford, provided him with a seat in Parliament. But he was short of money and had expensive tastes. He became a barrister at Gray’s Inn, rising rapidly to become a highly successful advocate and legal adviser to ...”

“... the 1960s and 1970s, in books like Geoffrey Ashe’s The Quest for Arthur’s Britain (1968) and John Morris’s The Age of Arthur (1973). Professional historians have long been embarrassed by the whole thing, but the image created – Roman cavalry leader rallies the British after the Roman army withdrawal and fights off hordes of invading Angles and Saxons ...”

“... followed a long path called the Essex Way that traversed the surprisingly deep country well to the north of the Thames corridor, before I debouched through Dedham Vale and the Stour Estuary to arrive at Harwich. I had never met anyone who had walked all the way from central London to the countryside – indeed, apart from my ten-year-old son, of whom more ...”

“... back on stage a year later and complained he had lost ‘$35 million in an hour’. The journalist John Hockenberry was fired from New York Public Radio when old allegations of workplace bullying were suddenly deemed sufficient. This happened just before an article about his sexual behaviour was published. He is one of the few men who have attempted to write ...”