“... Magna Carta that he hoped to export to Sierra Leone. The other English hero of Rough Crossings is John Clarkson, brother of Thomas, a navy officer who had spent his early career in the Caribbean without displaying any qualms about slavery. On returning to Britain in 1783, however, he was swept up in his brother’s campaigns. At the suggestion of ...”

“... began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis. John Major’s Government contemplates no political evolution whatever on the mainland, as distinct from in Ireland, and advertises this rigidity as ‘defence of the Union’. When it founders, however, such intransigence will be overtaken by long overdue ...”

“... absolute blast. Over more than 500 pages, its narrative only rarely fails to grip.’ According to John Walsh in the Independent, ‘the 500-plus pages of Life throb with energy, pulsate with rhythm and reverberate with good stories.’ And in case you think it’s just a boy thing, Michiko Kakutani, awarded a Pulitzer for her ‘fearless and ...”

“... but not overwhelmingly so. Beyond the Blade found that roughly half of all teenage knife deaths took place outside London and that the great majority of people killed with knives weren’t Black. Official studies, such as a report published in 2020 by the Mayor of London’s office, tend to conclude that a combination of poverty, childhood ...”

“... taste’ of Magritte’s house in the Rue des Mimosas in suburban Brussels, Jonathan Miller took off into one of his self-intoxicating fantasies. We were there together in the mid-Sixties to make a film for the BBC, and although I had forewarned him, Jonathan couldn’t believe that this overstuffed furniture, this aviary of china birds, these chiming ...”

“... loss of her daughter – that fixed her reputation.I never met Didion or her husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, but in September 1974 I heard Didion speak one evening in the Branford College common room at Yale. Dunne was there as well, stepping in when her voice began to trail off. I was teaching a non-fiction seminar on Wednesday evenings that year ...”

“... a weapon Nixon later made his own, while LBJ wiretapped not merely Nixon’s campaign manager, John Mitchell, but Nixon and his running mate, Agnew, too. More blame is laid off on bad advisers, especially Mitchell: ‘by encouraging the macho side of Nixon he created an atmosphere in which bad judgments were too easily made. Nixon the hater; Nixon the ...”

“... else. Despite the confidently comprehensive title they gave it, the editors of the First Folio, John Heminges and Henry Condell, were defeated by the task of assembling all of their late colleague’s plays: we will never know how many nights’ sleep they lost over their failure to secure a copy of Love’s Labour’s Won, written before 1598 and printed ...”

“... was in Paris as minister of munitions).As battle raged in the last week of July, Channon took himself off to the Normandy coast, where he was amused to find the hotel full of ‘very young rosy-faced English officers on leave with nice young French ladies who clumsily pretend in broken English to be their wives’. This ‘bon ville’ was ...”

“... The lines were later produced in court as evidence against her. The following day the police took her to the villa to quiz her on site. They gave her protective boots and gloves to wear; ‘Ta-dah,’ she sang when she put them on. This came up in court too, as proof she wasn’t taking the murder seriously. Knox says she merely ‘wanted to be friendly ...”

“... and not everyone wanted the whole thing). The poem appears to have been known in some form to John Ball, one of the leaders of the Great Rising of 1381. Copying always changed texts: scribes made deliberate corrections and accidental mistakes and often translated into their own dialects. Scholars no longer understand these changes as corruptions of a ...”

“... to battle comparable with Buchanan’s peroration: as the US army in the riots of that year ‘took back the streets of LA, block by block, so we must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country’. Trump’s speech was in the same key, but far more diffuse and less provocative. ‘We are one nation,’ he said, speaking of ...”

“... to his office. The only thing she could think of to say was: ‘I was not available.’ He took this as an admission she was having an affair and ‘positively beamed’ at her. She’s sure he’d have sacked her if she’d told him the truth. Afterwards, she felt the whips were looking at her ‘with new and comradely approval’. She wasn’t used ...”

“... Garden of England’ (the title Inglis gives his Chapter 6), but in the Fifties, when Raymond took up a tutorship and residence there, was (as it still is) a run-down seaside resort. The Workers’ Educational Association was not started in 1906 nor the BBC in 1926. The Daily Herald, ‘that much lamented Labour paper’, died in the Sixties (when it ...”

“... A piece of ass is two bucks and the swimming is great in the summer.’ In the early 1960s, John Hopkins, a graduate of Princeton, kept diaries of his visits to Paul and Jane Bowles: ‘Their intimacy is more fraternal than sexual. They live in separate apartments, one above the other, and communicate by a squeaking mauve toy telephone.’ Jane fell in ...”