“... vein, he wages a personal crusade against cupressus leylandii. Prescott is nervous about going to war with the conifer, as he has 16 of them in his back garden. Mullin finally gets to pitch his bid for a ban to Blair, who turns out to have given the matter his personal attention. The PM worries how the offensive will play in the suburban heartlands where, as ...”

“... of samizdat texts – caught almost everyone off guard. The Soviet authorities had assumed that class antagonism, the ultimate source of social and ideological deviance, had long since been eradicated. Western analysts, accustomed to regarding the Soviet Union as the archetypal totalitarian state, were similarly unprepared for public manifestations of ...”

“... too disturbing force, is just how compromised he was. He came from a very ordinary lower-middle-class family. He was born in 1886 near the Holloway Road, not far from where the Pooters famously resided. For part of his childhood the family lived in St Albans but Williams was always a great Londoner, a man as entranced by the city streets as Dickens or ...”

“... and in state institutions. ‘Racism is about Jubilee mugs and Rule Britannia and how we won the war,’ Widgery wrote. The problem is not just the new fascists from the old slime, a master race whose idea of heroism is ambushing single blacks in darkened streets. These private attacks whose intention, to cow and to brutalise, won’t work if the community ...”

“... and sucked on sugar cubes dipped in ether to dull the pain of prolonged exertion. Before World War Two, Belgian cyclists relied on heroin and amphetamines (a mixture they called ‘la Bomba’) to stay awake during 24-hour track races, and drank from water bottles filled with ‘la Moutarde’: liquid cocaine. Thomas Hicks won the St Louis marathon in 1904 ...”

“... a lesson. Godwin refused, so Edward called the Midland and Northern earls to back him up. Civil war was only prevented by the rank-and-file on both sides, who refused to fight other Englishmen over a quarrel among the elites.What sort of case can Licence make for his subject’s aims and abilities? It depends on what you want from a king. If you want the ...”

“... spirit. According to Bloemink, Stettheimer was a social documentarian whose work looks wryly at class, gender, religion and race in early 20th-century America. She makes a compelling case. Stettheimer was born in 1871 to German-Jewish parents who belonged to New York’s One Hundred Families. Her father disappeared when she was seven, but her mother’s ...”

“... by period – wore the same clothes is to deny the realities of a society structured around class.’ Philip Wright proposes that special reception areas should be attached to museums, where the categories of objects the museum contains (‘white man’s art’ and so on), the ‘jobs and personalities’ of their donors and the curricula vitae of the ...”

“... a not dissimilar feat with his account of his wartime film-making career. He was having a good war – as a motor-cycling instructor, and then as a gunnery officer guarding Churchill at Chequers, while back home the film-rights money was rolling in – when he got an order to report to Major Thorold Dickinson (director of Gaslight in civilian life). Carol ...”

“... so at Oxford.’ These are British complexities. Oxford and Cambridge and the Welsh working class; mathematics, philosophy, science and complicated political tendencies; the meaning of ‘traitor’ or (in Welsh) bradwr: these are the dominant themes in Loyalties. With The Prague Orgy we are in a more literary world – a real world, I mean, in which ...”

“... about Turnbull’s own, far from happy childhood in an Anglo-Scots Presbyterian middle-class family and of life at Westminster School. We are expected to infer that the socialisation of the Mbuti child is consistently coherent, integrative, loving, inducive of co-operation, while that of the Western child is disjointed, inconsistent, imbued with ...”

“... of his private life, and admitted that much of his output probably was as vulgar as his inter-war critics had claimed. Percy Young believed that the man and his music were inseparable, and presented Elgar as a ‘two-worldly character’, torn between the private poet of Worcestershire (who wrote great music), and the public poseur of London (who did ...”

“... widely and often, but his imagination was profoundly shaped by the places he visited, from the war-torn landscape of France to multicultural Navarre, from the slave markets of Genoa to the oppressive splendour of Milan. It is no accident that ‘The Clerk’s Tale’, the Canterbury Tales’s harrowing legend of an abused wife, takes place in ...”

“... Giotto sketching a pastoral scene with perfect skill. Born in 1922, Richard Hamilton was a working-class kid whose gift for drawing was recognised early on: at 12, he talked his way into adult classes, and at 16, not long before the Second World War, into the Royal Academy of Art. Yet, as we might expect of this ‘father of ...”

“... in the French language at the hands of a refugee Belgian countess. What is important about the war years is that there was no question of the princesses joining the Dutch, Danish and Norwegian royalties in Canada. ‘To the Queen of England,’ says Lady Longford, ‘all this was a non-question. The public never dreamt of their King and Queen leaving under ...”