“... with rich friends, he goes to the places rich people go. Nothing in his book suggests he has any strong prejudice against immigrants or an ingrained political hostility towards immigration: his wife, Ekaterina Paderina, is a Russian who overstayed her visa. Immigration (or ‘immigration, immigration, immigration’ as Banks has it) became the motif of the ...”

“... a convert to Evangelicalism. Gladstone’s ‘rescue work’ was undoubtedly the product of a very strong sexual drive. But it was sublimated. One can be as sure as one can be of anything that he was never guilty of what he described as ‘the act which is known as infidelity of the marriage bed’. He made a solemn declaration to that effect shortly before he ...”

“... of what he thought were like-minded professional historians to advise him. Niall Ferguson was one; Simon Schama was hired to convene a committee to produce a draft. But Gove wasn’t satisfied. Ferguson wanted the curriculum to have a global dimension, which wasn’t what Gove wanted at all; the proposals put forward by Schama’s committee also deviated too ...”

“... from poetry anthologies to studies of empire to the recent ‘family history of humanity’ by Simon Sebag Montefiore. These works tend to be rife with errors about her. With the appearance of Sophus Helle’s Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World’s First Author, we finally have a good English translation, alongside several essays, rich in ...”

“... only Cambridge poet (two slim volumes from Ferry Press, plus the mimeo’d Ouch from The Curiously Strong) to put enough of a dent in multinational budgets to command serious media attention was Peter Ackroyd, a meticulously re-invented Man of Letters. The others, until Ben Watson elbowed his way onto the scene, have had to settle for a succès ...”

“... on purchasing the house. Ross has a tougher take on what it was that made the will to conform so strong. The public silence of the townspeople about the disasters of Celebration – the jerry-built houses, the school, and the intense pressure on dissenting individuals to stop complaining or leave – was much more, for Ross, to do with keeping up the ...”

“... was no point in going for the last few years. But now it’s different.’ Lobbyists with strong connections to Labour have been in particularly high demand, commanding a salary premium of 10 to 20 per cent at the biggest firms. In the months before the election, several Labour advisers took up public affairs jobs. Freddie Cook, a long-serving ...”

“... who had put him in power crushed. A new republic was founded, with institutions – above all, a strong presidential executive – designed to give the country political stability. High-tech modernisation of the economy proceeded apace, with major infrastructural programmes and rapidly rising living standards in the towns, as growth accelerated. Large-scale ...”

“... writes, ‘is a place where miracles occur,’ and he himself dubs these raucous, ‘steam-roller strong’, three-to-four hour work-outs ‘my service’. ‘It’s something I’m heavily invested in, and my audience is heavily invested in. I take it pretty seriously,’ he said from the ICA stage. ‘I have no other skills,’ he added. ‘It’s the one ...”

“... college graduates and school teachers, were consigned to work as cleaners.Delmont makes a strong case that the unheralded work to which Blacks were assigned proved essential to Allied victory. Without the labour of thousands of Black troops removing mines, repairing railroad tracks and delivering food, ammunition, fuel and other supplies, the army ...”

“... us, ‘hitting me with a wire brush until I bled if I didn’t use the potty’. She also had strong views on constipation: ‘She laid me on the draining-board in the kitchen and stuck carbolic soap up my arse.’The young Reg didn’t like himself: ‘I was too fat, I was too short, my face just looked weird, my hair would never do what I wanted it ...”

“... the idea that autism should be treated by psychoanalysis. Kanner was not wholly wrong, by the way. Simon Baron-Cohen, the best-known British autism researcher today, has a research programme to investigate the extent to which the family trees of autists are made up of engineers, scientists and other abstract thinkers whose lives revolve around cold structures ...”

“... champion-advocate or house-interpreter to a burgeoning movement. And since a movement must seem strong, they tend not to be too picky about what gets the seal of approval. Could Fuller really have admired all of the work he ‘believed in’? Didn’t the cause of British painting, and the need to find living representatives, hijack his powers of ...”

“... a verdict of unlawful killing, which made possible the criminal prosecution for manslaughter of PC Simon Harwood. (He was acquitted.) The finding of death by misadventure in Peach’s case made any prosecution impossible, despite there being a strong argument for a second inquest. The High Court can order one, as it did ...”

“... penetration. George Kennan, the theorist of containment, argued that it was ‘better to have a strong regime in power’ in Latin America ‘than a liberal government if it is indulgent’ to Communists. And Washington helped make sure things stayed that way, funding and training security forces to disastrous ends in one country after another. Kennan wrote ...”