“... education of Negroes in America’). He also met the exponents of the free market Adam Smith and Bernard Mandeville. But though he delighted in their company, he scarcely needed to pick their brains; they only told him what he already thought.What Franklin did not fully appreciate was the huge gulf now beginning to separate the Americans from the ...”

“... deciphered the Japanese Code Purple during the Second World War, along with his wife, Elizebeth Smith, spent almost forty years studying the manuscript. The couple met at Riverbank Laboratories just outside Chicago (a private research facility that housed an acoustic testing laboratory, set up by a textile magnate who was convinced that Francis Bacon had ...”

“... elegies of Mary Darwall and Anna Seward, the sonnet sequences of Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith are only a few examples. The woman poet herself thus becomes a complex character, contemplating her public image with the pleasure of Mary Jones at mid-century: ‘Well, but the joy to see my works in print!/Myself too pictur’d in a mezzo-tint!’ Take ...”

“... less stringently to Asian businesses; in Beyond the Red Wall, published last year, the pollster Deborah Mattinson relates an Accrington voter’s complaints about an allegedly unhygienic Asian cornershop that the council fails to deal with.* But Labour’s attempts to appease voters who were tempted to defect to the BNP (in 2009, the then Burnley MP, Kitty ...”

“... seem to come in generational bursts). All writers on the Brontës now benefit from Margaret Smith’s magisterial – much overdue – edition of Charlotte’s extant letters, published by Oxford in three volumes between 1995 and 2004. Barker and Gordon have both made contributions to this anniversary season: Barker’s publishers have issued an updated ...”

“... True satiation. It seems so simple. Probably as simple as infinity and the universe.Unlike Patti Smith, her fellow New York rocker and ancient rival, Harry doesn’t do hallucinatory chats with dead lovers and a motel sign (‘Thank you, Dream Motel, I said … It’s the Dream Inn! the sign exclaimed’), or stud her text with dingy photos of chairs and ...”

“... of a non-Canaanite warrior god known as Yahweh from the Sinai or Arabah to the south. The Song of Deborah (Judges 5), a war chant dating from perhaps 1100 BCE, thus proclaims: O Yahweh, when you went out from Seir, when you marched from the land of Edom, the earth shook, the heavens poured, the clouds poured down water. The mountains quaked before ...”

“... I can. It’s not my sort of book at all, but it leaves me wanting to read his other books. Zadie Smith thinks it a masterpiece and says so on the cover. Certainly it’s a new way of writing a novel.25 May, Yorkshire. To Leeds this morning in an empty train with neither of us feeling very clever but revived by a lovely lunch at Sous le Nez in Leeds, mine ...”

“... conspiracy theories, has obliged his administration’s scientific authorities, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, to tiptoe around his volcanic ego. The blithe inaction and bumbling born of ideological vanity have resulted in tens of thousands of avoidable deaths in both countries, with ethnic minorities heavily overrepresented. Meanwhile, rage against white ...”

“... despite being silenced on the radio and disappeared from the shelves in Woolworth’s and W.H. Smith. But as two more hit singles followed – the promo video for ‘Pretty Vacant’ aired on Top of the Pops – and their well-produced, conventionally powerful first album, Never Mind the Bollocks, sold well too, the Sex Pistols started to resemble a ...”

“... not be the most reliable witness, as he also notes the presence of Charles Addams ‘and his wife, Deborah Kerr’. 24 September. Marcel Marceau dies. Much hated by Peter Cook (‘Marcel Arsehole’), who couldn’t stand the reverence with which mime was treated. Still it gave him a good joke: ‘I was there,’ he used to say, ‘the night Marcel Marceau ...”

“... Gary Maunders, a 57-year-old father of four who lived in the area, was spending the evening with Deborah Lamprell, who worked at Holland Park Opera. Yasin El Wahabi went to the mosque to say the prayer that would close his fast. His sister Nur Huda was revising. She was at Holland Park School and had been commended by her teachers recently for a recitation ...”