“... Crachami had been exhibited at 22 New Bond Street in London. This was 20 years before Phineas Taylor Barnum arrived from America with Tom Thumb. The Times declared Crachami ‘unquestionably the most curious of all the dwarfish candidates for public favour that have visited this metropolis’. The ‘Brief Memoir’ in the 1824 exhibition pamphlet claims ...”

“... Like Lenin, he was an admirer of the ‘time and motion’ studies of the American engineer F.W. Taylor, which he wished to apply in his own domain. One of his friends was the ardent Taylorite Alexei Gastev, who envisaged the complete mechanisation of human life and personality as the task of the future (it was against such views that Zamyatin wrote his ...”

“... a distinguished garment and must be over a century old. A present from my friend the composer George Fenton, he bought it me from John Pearse, the posh tailor in Meard Street, where he was told it had been made by Proust’s tailor in Paris. It still has some of its original frogging and a sartorial historian (or archaeologist) could detect where there ...”

“... Charlie Boyle, Helen Dowie, Jimmy Dyce, Charlie Logan, Margaret Logan, Bert Lumsden, George Manclark, Derek Stubbs, Peter Young and also Alex Falconer’). As this shows, they didn’t all have to be men, but usually they were. There is no doubt that Brown tried to re-create these bonds with groups of personal allies throughout his political ...”

“... Lisa Nandy in Wigan to Angela Rayner in Ashton-under-Lyne, from Rebecca Long-Bailey in Salford to George Galloway in Rochdale, the politics of place are as central here as party politics.I met Gavin Grimshaw, six foot four, lean and sunburned in a Lonsdale boxing vest, in the simply furnished two-storey terraced house in Bury where he currently lives. The ...”

“... scratch round-up of whoever’s available and an exercise we went through both with The Madness of George III and The Lady in the Van partly to find out how long the play is likely to be and also to get some notion of what it’s about. And it is helpful, though painful and embarrassing too as some sections are far from finished, the characters scarcely ...”

“... thus more pleasingly. Compare: ‘On fait de son mieux pour faire ses devoirs soi-même.’Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the posthumously published Anima Poetae, argued that ‘it’ was the right pronoun for referring to indefinite nouns like ‘everyone’ or ‘the person’, ‘in order to avoid particularising man or woman, or in order to express either ...”

“... a broken child’s swing) contrasted with photographs of the queen sitting masked and alone in St George’s Chapel at Windsor the following day. The police became involved, handing down 126 fixed penalty notices, including for Johnson and Sunak, the most senior politicians ever to be punished by the law. Johnson’s personal poll ratings, never very ...”

“... on the dominance of the big seven private housebuilding companies – in descending order of size, Taylor Wimpey, Barratt Homes, Persimmon, Bellway, Redrow, Bovis and Crest Nicholson – who between them have almost 40 per cent of the market in new homes. But the most striking thing in the document is a chart displaying the history of Britain, in housebuilding ...”

“... and the first person in Tewkesbury to die as a result of the floods, 19-year-old Mitchell Taylor, had drowned while taking a short cut past the abbey on his way home from the pub. Passers-by heard him yelling for help – he couldn’t swim – and tried in vain, via mobile phone and the 999 centre, to guide a helicopter to him. His body was found a ...”

“... had a heart attack.)In the US, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary, the governor of New York, George Pataki, signed a Bill which would legally require high school students to study the Great Famine. ‘History teaches us,’ he said, ‘that the Great Hunger was not the result of a massive Irish crop failure, but rather a deliberate campaign by the ...”

“... reduced me to sudden tears.) I began absorbing ever more specialised fare: Macdonald’s books, Taylor and Tuchman on the political background, battle histories of Gallipoli, Verdun and Passchendaele, books about Haig and Kitchener, VAD nurses, brave dead subalterns and monocled mutineers. I read Michael Hurd’s desolating biography – The Ordeal of Ivor ...”

“... But they know their days are numbered. Edna Bonhomme‘Trust women.’ These were the words of Dr George Tiller, an abortion provider in Kansas, who was murdered while at church by an anti-choice militant. This was in 2009, a year after I moved to New York City and just as my friends and I were forming light-hearted relations grounded on newly found sexual ...”

“... appointed to work on Grenfell Tower, sent an email to Feilding-Mellen attaching a link to the George House flats in Kilburn which showed the cladding they wished to use. ‘It uses the same brushed aluminium material and finish proposed for Grenfell Tower, but folded into cladding cassettes which conceal almost all fixings.’ Feilding-Mellen replied to ...”