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“... to take over the Russian near-abroad, or Swedes who want to avenge their defeat at the hands of Peter the Great (that pearl came from Kiselev). It’s hard to find anyone who takes this stuff literally, but it helps to create a climate in which conspiracy becomes the norm. The Ukrainian crisis has also triggered other, far less savoury associations. At one ...”

“... still produced in Egypt during the Middle Ages, but gradually edged out by parchment and paper. Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny in the mid-12th century, saw all three materials as profane surfaces on which to inscribe holy texts: God reads, you say, the book of the Talmud in heaven. If it is the same kind of book as the others we typically read every ...”

“... shows how distant visual phenomena can be described in close physical terms: The point of one white star is quivering still Deep in the orange light of widening morn becomes One cold metallic grain is quivering still Deep in the flood of warm ethereal fluid. The fact that a blind poet could make the translation suggests that the problem was not one of ...”

“... Walcott’s extravagance of poetic diction and tendency to verbosity off-putting in the past’ (Peter Porter); ‘I feel that the fuss and the language are not quite justified by the donné’ (Roy Fuller). Derek Walcott has suffered, perhaps more than any other contemporary poet writing in English, from accusations that his work is too showy. Some of the ...”

“... and I came across the local racecourse. She would put the dog on its lead and I would approach the white rails where the horses – with their mad eyes, soft telescopic nostrils, bulging veins and bony legs – were being restrained in front of the nooses stretched across the track by tense, hunched dwarfs in brilliant silks who abused each other with words I ...”

“... all that was left of the old neighbourhood was a chemical factory. One of his mates at school was Peter Hook, who ended up playing bass in the band; Hook likes to describe himself as an ‘oik’. Curtis was more bookish, and isolated. Joy Division’s music was bleak, full of frustration, fear and guilt. They were produced by Martin Hannett, whose studio ...”

“... He has also gained from the release of translator’s notes of the Vienna summit in 1961, from White House conversations taped by Kennedy (years before Nixon), and from the records of conferences on the Cuban missile crisis held in the late Eighties, which included key participants like Rusk, Bundy, McNamara, Gromyko and Dobrynin. He is therefore able to ...”

“... until they reached the coast nearAbbeville’. At 11 a.m. on Saturday, 25 May, 1940, eight white mice received approximately eight times the minimal lethal number of streptococci. Four of these were set aside as controls, but four others received injections of penicillin – either a single injection of 10 milligrams or repeated injections of 5 ...”

“... the beginning of 1944. His illness was painful and temporarily disabling, hardly meriting the white feather sent by a relative, but it had its compensations. His enforced withdrawal served as a time for reflection. He read Das Kapital from cover to cover (though remaining unconverted). Thorpe persuasively suggests that it was now that Dunglass acquired ...”

“... I mean.” ’ It seems ‘she was just sick and tired of having museum walls cluttered with empty white canvases.’ At an opening in Pasadena a woman who had just given the museum a million dollars made a frontal attack. Irwin reports it: Later that evening this lady came up to me and told me, literally told me that I was not to do this kind of thing any ...”

“... a Conservative government by a Labour Party dedicated to regenerating the country through the ‘white heat of technology’. Each event marked, in its way, a decline of power. The first saw the disappearance of a liberal individualist state, governed by a caste of liberal individualist gentlemen. The second ushered in a government that sealed Britain’s ...”

“... wear the ‘absurdly uncomfortable’ clothes into which the Victorian child was squeezed, the ‘white piqué starched frocks’ and the velvet hair ribbons ‘fastened with a bit of elastic looped over a button behind the ear’ that was so tight it gave her a headache. Difficulties with clothes occur in many of her books. ...”

“... of the Tin Tent During the first push on the Somme a temporary captain in the Royal Engineers – Peter Nissen a Canadian designed an experimental steel tent that could be erected from stacked materials by an NCO and eight men in 110 minutes so the Nissen hut is the descendant and enriched relation of the Elephant and other similar steel structures that were ...”

“... as the First Reform Bill or the Charge of the Light Brigade. I have started by reading in parallel Peter Jenkins’s Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution and the two concluding volumes of Halévy’s magisterial History of the English People in the 19th Century, which between them take the story from 1895 to 1914. The contrast is not so much between an era of greatness ...”

“... can revalidate cast-offs with wit; photographers prove you can make them look good in black and white. The beauty of bath can be oppressive, and if the choice were put in terms of living rather than visiting, many might prefer the visual anarchy of a development zone. The anxiety the Prince’s polite cityscapes would save us from could be replaced by ...”