“... without your having to mention it. I got chatting to two railworkers, Steve Hughes and Simon Breach, who were having a pint outside a pub on Ramsgate High Street. Both had it drummed into them by their fathers to vote Labour, with tales of the horrors of the Thatcher years. Both feel they were let down by their union, the RMT, in a recent dispute ...”

“... field. On the audience side, there is something of the attraction that the criminologist Simon Cottee writes about in his part-investigative, part-confessional Watching Murder: ISIS, Death Videos and Radicalisation. As a young man, hearing that a video existed online of the beheading by Islamic radicals of the American journalist Daniel Pearl, he ...”

“... art more pernicious to men than all the ills it pretends to cure’. But no one who follows Simon Schama’s advice helpfully prescribed in the blurb – ‘take a dose of the book at least once a day and retire early to bed’ – will sleep easy. In fact, two narratives are here in constant tension. One is an up to date, deeply informed, but ...”

“... Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s formative experiences there, whether Carolyn had caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring ...”

“... if a hospital goes bust somebody takes up the slack. Lansley chose 19 July, the day Rupert and James Murdoch had the media transfixed with their testimony to the Culture Select Committee, to let slip that from next April a billion pounds’ worth of NHS services, including wheelchair services for children and ‘talking therapies’ for people suffering ...”

“... have recently provided the material for works by artists as different from each other as P.D. James, DV8 Physical Dance Theatre and David Lynch. Stephen Egger, an American academic and former policeman who wrote the first doctoral dissertation on the phenomenon, gives a definition/description of serial murder in Serial Murder: An Elusive Phenomenon: A ...”

“... Even after 35 years, the simplest questions about Cuban politics remain almost beyond the reach of objective analysis. Is the Castro regime a tyranny which can only perpetuate itself by resort to repression, as the Cuban-American community in Miami and elsewhere insists? Or does it persist, despite the disintegration of the Soviet bloc and the deepening economic crisis, essentially because it incarnates a national identity struggling for survival against the engulfing pressure of US political, economic and cultural expansionism? Is the regime doomed to collapse, with only the ruthlessness of the Jefe Máximo to delay the inevitable? Or has it so transformed Cuban society that the next generation are bound to construct their future largely on the foundations laid down by the Revolution? In 1962, we now learn from The Secret Cuban Missile Crisis Documents, the CIA answered such questions in the following terms: The Castro regime retains the positive support of about 20 per cent of the population, but dissent is increasing ...”

“... and activity were not to be seen in the outside world of business, travel or employment. As St Simon Stylites probably found, standing on a pillar revered for piety means a loss of control of more earthly affairs. The most extraordinary episode produced by the belief that nature had formed women only for activities within the home was the famous ...”

“... and Morrison published in Contemporary British Poetry: Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Derek Mahon, Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Elaine Feinstein are all ...”

“... adjustment of an iconic constitutional moment is one of several that Davies proposes or recalls. Simon de Montfort, conventionally presented as the originator of English Parliamentary freedom, may well, it now seems (the matter is under much scholarly debate), have been following French ideas. The very idea of Parliament’s Englishness, in fact, is one of ...”

“... the end not only of Haydon’s career, but of painting in ‘the tradition of Joshua Reynolds, James Barry and Benjamin West’. How convincing this argument is depends on how we view that ‘tradition’. Of the three artists only West, who found a royal patron with the necessary deep pockets and high ceilings, made a career as a history painter. Reynolds ...”

“... 1660s, under the enthusiastic leadership of the new king, Charles II, and his brother, the future James II. In 1665, it was James’s eagerness to capture Dutch slave-trading forts on the West African coast that set off the second Anglo-Dutch war. In the last quarter of the century, English ships carried almost 300,000 ...”

“... the employee of a private trading company. Yet, just as Newport was ultimately acting on behalf of James I, so Cortés’s expedition had been made possible by private Spanish financiers. The ‘king’ Powhatan was clearly no Montezuma, and Newport’s attempt to crown him (with a copper crown) ended in farce. His ‘empire’ was no empire, and contained ...”

“... Where Are You, Alice is wealthier and more accomplished than Felix (though not as robust) and Simon is older and more enamoured of Eileen than she of him (though he hedges his bets more). Each relationship as it blossoms causes the redistribution of popularity, money, energy, knowledge, wit and security, and creates a tiny cell of resistance to the idea ...”

“... in more ways than one. The atmosphere was liberal and he made life-long friends there, including Simon Bussy and Albert Marquet. Matisse the art student was rowdier and unrulier than his later respectability would suggest (‘Oh do tell the American people that I am a normal man; that I am a devoted husband and father, that I have three fine children, that I ...”