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“... idea of the nation’. Since then it has spread around the world. The London conference, which took place over three days at the Emmanuel Centre, was the eighth NatCon gathering. Few previous far-right jamborees had boasted such a deep roster of senior British politicians: Michael Gove; Suella Braverman, who proclaimed in her keynote address that ‘white ...”

“... late – and rightly so, given their immense contribution to our understanding of the route Darwin took to natural selection. The situation is changing, however: a number of institutional studies have appeared since the 1982 centenary of Darwin’s death when Kohn’s book went to press – on the Botanical Society, on the Geological Survey and on the ...”

“... downwards.’ The profound patriotism of Shelley and Byron, the inability to think logically of John Stuart Mill and Cardinal Newman and Lewis Carroll? No, it won’t do, and Orwell, for once, was talking through his hat – perhaps relaxing in what he considered an ‘English’ manner. It really seems, then, not quite proper that distinguished experts ...”

“... Nico, on which she sings some of the band’s best-known tracks, but they were not welcoming. John Cale recalled that, listening back to rehearsal tapes, they would ‘hear her go off-key or hit the wrong pitch at the start. We would sit there and snigger.’ Lou Reed, understandably, wanted to sing his songs himself, but Warhol and Morrissey were ...”

“... is the only British prime minister ever to have been assassinated? But both he and his nemesis, John Bellingham, are more interesting than this implies, and the fatal act that brought them together, Andro Linklater thinks, is more significant and also more mysterious. They have been the subject of two previous books, by Mollie Gillen (1972) and David ...”

“... of the Standard Oil Company, the series did little to celebrate the company or its founder, John D. Rockefeller. ‘It is doubtful if there has ever been a time since 1872 when he has run a race with a competitor and started fair,’ Tarbell wrote. But she didn’t call for an end to the corporate form Rockefeller had done so much to ...”

“... is found dead and blackened in his bed and in due course so is his grandson. Later, I dabbled in John Evelyn’s Sylva. Reprehensibly perhaps, I’ve never paid as much attention to my surroundings on a country walk as I have to descriptions of the natural world in books, all the better in Sylva for its being a guide for stewards and landowners. (You don’t ...”

“... which he believed he had to hit his co-star: ‘No, I can’t hit a woman!’ Hopper, I imagine, took a deep breath before explaining ‘that you never actually hit anyone in a movie, that it was all faked, but the film was cut in such a way as to give the impression that it actually happened’. Being part of and owning the real world through acting and ...”

“... inside each of these decisions and showing how natural and right they came to seem to those who took them. But the Second World War was also a war of rapid movement, in which sweeping changes transformed the strategic situation almost overnight. There is no better example than the German advance across Scandinavia and Western Europe in the first half of ...”

“... after his early winning streak, as each new play bombed, he underwent public whippings. John Simon called Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer and Sweet Bird of Youth ‘cowardly’, and, in 1978, wrote: ‘The kindest thing to assume is that Williams died shortly after completing Sweet Bird of Youth, and that his subsequent, ever more dismal ...”

“... Victorian values and all the rest. Mark Hollingsworth and Paul Halloran describe the way Mark took over the marketing of his mother’s memoirs, and almost completely messed it up. At one stage an experienced literary agent, George Greenfield, was brought in to advise, but found himself ‘constantly interrupted by Mrs Thatcher . . . who fixed him with ...”

“... to the Roman people at the dedication of the Lateran Church that Constantine built’ (i.e. St John Lateran), and Sylvester, in the robes of papal office and attended by servants with holy vessels. True, the sculptor had failed to enter the year when all this happened. But the quality of the carvings, which resembled the crude reliefs on the Arch of ...”

“... adopted the same principles for the educational institutions she set up for both sexes. She took over the Westminster Infants’ School from her father and, after Buchanan retired, re-established it in a new form at Portman Hall. Boys and girls of all religious affiliations studied and sang together. Influenced by the pioneering doctor Elizabeth ...”

“... his first wife, having to uproot herself every few months with their little son, Otto, as Crippen took a new post at another homeopathic or ophthalmic hospital. By the time of her death in 1892, at 33, her husband had abandoned jobs in Ohio, San Diego, Detroit, New York and Salt Lake City. He had also, thanks to his mentor Dr Phil Porter (‘one of ...”

“... there were spent rockets in the gutters and the scent of woodsmoke and gunpowder hung in the air.John Withington’s meticulous history of fireworks begins with childhood memories that resemble my own: his Bonfire Nights were in Manchester in the 1950s and mine two decades later in Kent, but almost everything was the same. Fireworks were the centrepiece, not ...”