“... a small island in the Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu, offers a contrasting picture. Ahamb had no history of witch-hunts, but while Bratrud was there a Christian revivalist movement took hold, leading to accusations and admissions of sorcery, and rituals of public discipline, punishment and murder. Bratrud’s account begins in 2009, when two men from ...”

“... permission to use the runnels and platforms for The Vertical Line, a performance piece devised by John Berger. In Ways of Seeing, Berger presented on television for the first time an ideological analysis of art and aesthetics. One of the programmes juxtaposed pin-ups and centrefolds with Titians, in a powerful early assault on advertising. Thirty years ...”

“... he leaves America, in the Nigerian consulate, where an ‘expediting’ surcharge, which generates no receipt, is required to make sure that documents are prepared in the timeframe stipulated as standard on the consulate website. The fee is to be paid by money order, in a way that looks official and above board but is nothing of the kind. All this happens in ...”

“... when to meetings for Alcoholics Anonymous. The $560 reunion charge was not cheap but there were no other charges, no need to buy even a drink or an icecream, and the charge covered wives, partners and children, all of us to be housed in student rooms. The reunion programme offered five full schedules for different junior ...”

“... covered the walls where I had tried to steady myself. A pungent smell filled the air. Down the hall in the bathroom she found two damp bath-towels stained with blood. I was in the kitchen, sprawled face-down on the floor. Blood had congealed in a pool round my head. In a panic Gilly tried to sit me up but my movements were unco-ordinated and my speech ...”

“... John Singer Sargent has often been accused of lacking a soul. Even Henry James, who helped introduce him to the London scene in the 1880s and continued to promote his work, worried that he suffered from a ‘sort of excess of cleverness’. The fact that Sargent catered to a transatlantic clientele of celebrities and nouveaux riches at the height of the Gilded Age only encouraged the imputations of superficiality ...”

“... the Authorised Version, has not taken its place. The New Bible is so dreary and flat that no one reads it. Children nowadays are offered fairy stories that have some vague connection with the Bible. Adults do not read the Bible at all. As to St James’s Church, Pentonville, the moral of that story is that one should never put off visiting a church of ...”

“... With the possible and significant exception of the steam-engine, no artifact in modern England has been the object of such fanciful, romanticised and well-articulated veneration as the country house. Nineteenth-century novelists, like Surtees or Trollope, tended to give minutely-detailed accounts of country-house life, which were more precise than rhapsodic ...”

“... jet plane curtsying in its skirts of noise’ is a random example; ‘the concert hall with its lamps trembling in triumph like the train-ferry when it puts in’; blue wind-flowers that ‘shoot up out of the brown rustle of last year in overlooked places where one’s gaze never pauses’; or ‘It’s spring 1827. Beethoven/hoists his death ...”

“... Peto took 7 Collingham Gardens himself) lived like merchant princes. (Gilbert hung hams in the hall fireplace.) House plans did not change very much, but mansion flats brought new demands; among the most interesting of the many excellent drawings are those showing the hydraulic lift in Abingdon Mansions. Contemporary photographs of the Underground stations ...”

“... Like many others I have been puzzled by the reaction to John Smith’s death. It was reported as though it were at least that of a prime minister, and his funeral was, as the BBC noted, in effect a state funeral. The decision of both the BBC and ITV to double the ordinary length of their evening news broadcasts on the day of his death could be put down to the social democratish inclinations of the programmers, but the speed with which the coverage had to be assembled suggests that it was more instinctive ...”

“... youth who featured in the advertisement, underscored by the slow movement of Dvorak’s Symphony No 9, arranged for brass, went on to become a fireman in East Ham. And, presumably, to find himself caught up in the aggravations of the Thatcher period, the climate of economic belt-tightening and union-bashing. Lord Tebbit’s helpful remarks, delivered to a ...”

“... and ‘hospital building is not like pyramid building, the erection of memorials.’ There was no longer any plausible function for most of these vast complexes, and reform should ‘err on the side of ruthlessness’. The mental healthcare of the future would take place in general hospitals, and the number of beds would be halved, with care in the local ...”

“... Mr Primakov, his jolly proletarian bounce temporarily deserting him, left Baghdad Airport. He had no plans to return. The talk in the British and American Embassies was of war by the fourth week in November. I found myself looking out of the window again. From the television screen there came a blare of trumpets. A man on a magnificent white stallion was ...”

“... the Heights takes place there, and Heathcliff as a kind of diabolical man-woman-cook who touches no food is more closely identified with it than with the moors, or with his machinations against the Earnshaw family, or even with Catherine. The real secret of Wuthering Heights may be its fierce and compelling fantasy and metamorphosis of the passions and rages ...”