“... of Storey’s This Sporting Life (1960), battered rugby league player Arthur Machin makes what may or may not be his final appearance on the pitch. Knowing that for him the ‘game’ (in more than a sporting sense) is up, he looks beyond its claustrophobic mayhem at the ‘life’ not yet ‘absorbed’ into it: at ...”

“... worse; if we go on as we are, the scientists warned, our planet’s near-to-medium-term outlook may well be grim. Cape Grim, aptly named in 1798 by its British discoverer, Matthew Flinders RN, is a 3o0-foot sandstone spike projecting into the Southern Ocean on the wind-whipped western coast of Tasmania. Here nine weather scientists reporting to the IPCC ...”

“... it would be Post’s fault when a communist uprising began in a ‘saturnalia of violence’ on May Day 1920. He foretold mass assassinations, the storming of government buildings, rivers of blood. It was excellent copy for the newspapers, but they turned against him when the day passed like any other. No President Palmer. Warren Harding campaigned on his ...”

“... corps of like-minded Vietnamese, one a history teacher fascinated by Napoleon, Vo Nguyen Giap. In May 1941 at Chingshi in South China they founded the League for the Independence of Vietnam, Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh, or for short, Vietminh. (Vietcong, ‘Vietnamese Communist’, was a dismissive label invented in Saigon that the VC themselves never ...”

“... Richardson, and he sang David’s praises. ‘He’s the ideal playwright. Never says a word.’5 May. Angels in America opens at the National. When I saw the original production at the Cottesloe in 1992 I found I was sitting behind Derek Jarman. I knew Derek slightly since he had been in the adaptation of Orton’s Prick Up Your Ears, and I knew, too, that ...”

“... but the idyll is deceptive as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester ...”

“... these officials on a strategy which is wholly unfamiliar to them and of which, to begin with, they may understand little. For that reason, above all others, it is essential that the strategies adopted by these institutions are debated more widely and more knowledgeably. Both Jonathan Steele’s book and John Gray’s essay sharpen a critique which has so far ...”

“... there would be inflation. One must wait for economies to right themselves. (‘Is it your view,’ Richard Kahn asked Hayek when he came to Cambridge to explain his theory in 1931, ‘that if I went out tomorrow and bought a new overcoat, that would increase unemployment?’ ‘Yes,’ was the reply. Keynes, although he greatly disliked Hayek’s argument, saw ...”

“... would have been fascinated by the scientific methods that enabled the recent identification of Richard III’s bones and would not have been surprised that the remains of the last Plantagenet king should be discovered beneath a Leicester car park. ‘Grave-stones tell truth scarce fourty years.’ Nor should we bet on the posthumous survival of our ...”

“... extended essay, unfinished on his death in 2003 – the pages about 1944-45 have been written by Richard Neustadt. There is much to be gained from Jenkins’s insights but Patrick Renshaw’s study, though equally succinct, is much more substantial. Renshaw is a specialist in American economic and labour history, and, as might be expected, his book has most ...”

“... else could the art historian E.H. Gombrich be transformed by a feat of necromancy into his son Richard, and suddenly appear as ‘a distinguished Orientalist’? What other magical city could induct a wizard of Johnson’s calibre and pack him off to France to discover Jean-Marie Le Pen’s followers celebrating their Welsh origins (‘nos ancêtres les ...”

“... this assumption has been frustrated. Writing in 2004, five years into devolution, the historian Richard Finlay noted that ‘for all the talk of Scotland being more radical than England and of the nation being predisposed towards left-of-centre redistributive policies, these characteristics have not really manifested themselves in any meaningful ...”

“... endorsed by the General Assembly that November, but fighting broke out immediately and worsened in May 1948, when the mandate ended. It was at this point that Lie sent Bernadotte and Bunche to force an agreement. When Bernadotte was murdered Bunche was ‘trapped’, as he told Ruth. No one wanted responsibility but everyone had a view. That November, speaking ...”

“... the future tank became a naval project. Swinton did not learn of this development until late in May, but Churchill had made considerable progress in the meantime. A new Landships Committee was to be chaired by Tennyson d’Eyncourt, a submarine expert. Its secretary was Albert Stern, a banker in civilian life. By the end of summer there was general ...”

“... But there were no beds available and he was seen as an out-patient every day until his trial on 3 May, at which point a bed was found for him in Dulwich North Hospital. He was remanded on bail on condition that he went to hospital – if a bed had not become available he would have gone to prison. There have been several cases recently in which High Court ...”