“... made something out of Elizabeth’s being so upset that he did not come (she had cooked pheasant, John drove to the station) and, more interestingly, out of her decision to grovel rather than embarrass, and annoy, Herman by saying, here is the original letter, why on earth did you pretend to send a carbon? She knew, of course, Herman would never forgive her ...”

“... who first tried to assassinate a unionist politician, shooting the hardline Stormont minister John Taylor six times yet failing to kill him. All this meant the Officials could compete with the Provos for support in Derry and West Belfast, but it didn’t sit well with the nominal goal of the movement, which was the reform of the Northern Irish state, not ...”

“... the way some also consider how this habit of dividing the work of a lifetime into distinct periods took hold. Stylistic and biographical conjectures along these lines were common in the 19th century, and they persisted in various forms until fairly recently. Then they came to be regarded as the product of a false consonance between art and the history of the ...”

“... Sailors tended to start their working lives young, even by 18th-century standards, and few of them took their formal education very far, but many if not most were literate, and not a few were self-educated. They read for pleasure, for profit and for self-improvement, since the ability to read, and especially to figure, opened up possibilities of ...”

“... century that what Charbonnier calls the modern project of ‘abundance and autonomy’ properly took shape; the later extraction of enormous stocks of carbon from the ground, which liberated European economies from dependence on the sun and the seasons, merely allowed this project to be realised. Even before Watt’s steam engine and the first factories, it ...”

“... her psychedelic, post-apocalyptic installation at Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries in 2021, which took full advantage of the neoclassical surroundings. It must have been hard to translate the work, which included sound, colourful video projections and otherworldly sculptures, to the compact space it occupies at Tate Liverpool. The cluster of video screens ...”

“... some secret. That was why they forced him kicking and screaming into the trunk of a car and took him to the Cajón del Maipo. There, in the middle of the mountain night, they let him out and they shot him, just as he had done to so many of his own targets. Just as had been done to José Weibel, to Carlos Maluje Contreras. The man who tortured people ...”

“... and waving green branches – a symbol of grief, cleansing and continuity in Luo culture. It took several hours for the coffin to make the short journey to parliament, as thousands walked alongside the motorcade. The crowds were so large that the public viewing was moved to Kasarani Stadium. But the event quickly descended into chaos. People streamed ...”

“... fires. He also worked for the World and the World-Telegram, where he started writing features that took him to the Fulton Fish Market on the South Street seaport, in lower Manhattan – later the setting for some of the brilliant stories in his books Old Mr Flood and The Bottom of the Harbour.* (The market is operational today, but the seaport has been ...”

“... the tastes of its royal owners, Queen Mary and King George V. There was a working toilet made by John Bolding and Sons, and a gun room stocked with Purdey shotguns powerful enough to shoot flies. Artists created hundreds of paintings and books for its clubby, masculine library. Harold Nicolson gamely contributed a tiny treatise on ‘The Detail of ...”

“... anniversary of a school that one of Luther’s followers wrested away from the monastery of St John in 1529 and renamed the Johanneum. Great figures of the German Enlightenment had taught or studied there; C.P.E. Bach and Telemann had been music masters during the 18th century. All this is to make clear that my image of my father before I knew him is of a ...”

“... one of them he put into action as follows. One summer evening, as was his custom, Maestro Domenico took his lute and made his way out of Santa Maria Nuova, leaving Andrea there drawing in his room. Andrea had declined his invitation to join him on a walk, saying he had some urgent drawing work to do. So Domenico went off and pursued his usual rounds of ...”

“... wherever he could: he dreamed of killing his mother, and burning the house down around her, and he took revenge on the other boys at Grantham grammar school by doing better at lessons than them. His mother wanted him to become a farmer, but he defied her by getting a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge at the age of 18. He remained surly and solitary ...”

“... wear his convict’s uniform once a year. In 1961, 90 years after Stead, a young man who took him as his hero was appointed editor of his old paper, the Northern Echo. At 33, Harold Evans wasn’t quite as precocious as his predecessor, but he came from a world in some ways closer to Stead’s than to England today. In the engaging early pages of My ...”

“... chances were sorted out according to their place in the social structure; their very personalities took shape within the forces of socialisation.’ Then things fell apart. Not only in the external world – things have been falling apart, after all, since the onset of modernity; the last quarter of the 20th century was scarcely more fractious than the first ...”