“... of the Kittredge biography that Sir Thomas Malory had begun his military career under Sir Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick and paragon of chivalry; but this would have had him starting his criminal career in his fifties and writing the Morte Darthur in his seventies. Field shows easily that Beauchamp’s retainer must have been another man. Malory ...”

“... these ventures to succeed. No Farinelli or Senesino, no Cuzzoni or Faustina, have ever been within miles of the financial range of our revivalists. With singers well-known on our amateur choral circuit, Lewis and Farncombe have consistently shown us the glory of Handel’s devotion to the theatre. This allows Jonathan Keates to get the balance right in his ...”

“... in the name of objective science. The cycle was repeated in 1994 with the publication of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, which extended Jensen’s basic thesis into a 900-page exposition of the genetic bases of social inequality, crime, poverty and unemployment. In the meantime, a re-examination of Cyril Burt’s work in ...”

“... The relative humidity is 56, the winds are south-westerly at seven mph, visibility stands at six miles. What do those numbers really signify? The temperature doesn’t sound extreme, yet when I leave my air-conditioned house I don’t feel that I’m stepping outside so much as entering another atmosphere. My spirits sag, my lips soon taste of sweat. Is this ...”

“... a par with Samuel Johnson’s. He noted that Bage had ‘very seldom’ travelled more than fifty miles from home, had never spent more than a week in London, and considered him raised ‘in the bosom of rusticity’. The truth was rather different. Though not formally associated with any group, Bage had links through Erasmus Darwin with both the Lichfield ...”

“... The Cradle Will Rock and attaches suitable significance to Welles’s 1941 Broadway staging of Richard Wright’s Native Son, which was no less daring than Citizen Kane. In any case, it would be impossible to ignore politics when writing about Welles’s wartime activities, and especially the ill-fated government-subsidised documentary It’s All True, the ...”

“... or so away. In October 1917, after the Italians were routed at the Battle of Caporetto, a hundred miles north-west, the Austrians advanced and occupied Tezze for a year until the tide turned at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. A combined force of Italian troops and the British 7th Division then crossed the Piave and recaptured the town. Thousands died in the ...”

“... the European consciousness after the Suez Canal opened in 1869 and the port of Assab, about 1500 miles down the coast, was sold by the presiding sultan to an Italian priest. After the Berlin conference, the Italians landed a force at another port, Massawa, and pushed 25 miles inland, where it was wiped out in 1887 by an ...”

“... a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you cannot walk without ...”

“... if not detail, it is heir to Colen Campbell’s Ebberston Hall near Scarborough: sprightly and miles away from Office of Works Georgian, RAF Neo-Georgian, War Office Georgian.Perhaps the Architecture of the Modern Age had already arrived. It was there for all to see in the Germany of the Weimar republic: glass and streamlining and, in the north, in ...”

“... convinced that Blacks lacked the capacity for aerial warfare, at first kept them hundreds of miles from the battle zone. But the Airmen went on to play a key role in the Battle of Anzio, shooting down a dozen enemy planes. In the last two years of the war, some Black soldiers were able to take part in ground combat, including D-Day and the Battle of the ...”

“... controls that voice? What does it echo, in the long history of warfare examined by John Keegan and Richard Holmes in their book-of-the-television-series, Soldiers? It looks to me as if fighting men have adhered to perhaps half a dozen different codes. There is the ‘rape and pillage’ style: a gang of men sets off to plunder a wealthy place, seize ...”

“... to secure the necessary permit to hire horses in the city. The murderers covered nearly twenty miles on foot before collapsing, exhausted, at an inn where the posse caught up with them. When the bewildered Guido asked how they knew who to look for and where to find him, and was told that his wife was still living, he fainted. (It later emerged that his ...”

“... Sisman has now studied three: Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Briggs, leaving only Eric Hobsbawm to Richard Evans. Briggs’s widow, Susan, commissioned Sisman to write this Life, and in fact the man himself noted before his death in 2016 that if there had to be a biography, Sisman would be the right person to do it. The result is an elaborately detailed and ...”

“... most of the downs to the north of Pitton. In the 1920s the villagers were aware of them as miles of dereliction, just over the horizon. It was possible to see the outlines of the deserted fields and even of the plough ridges, for they had been abandoned without even being sown to grass. On some the dominant vegetation was not even weeds but brown and ...”