“... just propaganda. At about that moment, 300 kilometres to the east, a 12-tonne missile – designed by a former member of the BIS’s German sister society, the Verein für Raumschiffahrt – left the ground carrying a one-tonne high-explosive warhead. The party in the pub shook their heads over the technological defeatism of the Americans: the missile rose out ...”

“... appointed the UK’s first ‘free speech tsar’. The position – Ahmed’s official title will be director for freedom of speech and academic freedom – is a creation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which passed into law in May. Ahmed will work out of the Office for Students and have the power of ‘monitoring and enforcing’ regulations ...”

“... had a hit show to publicise before). The first series ran on BBC4 in March; the second series will be broadcast next year. Mad Men is an unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better. We watch and know better about male chauvinism, homophobia, anti-semitism, workplace harassment, housewives’ depression, nutrition and smoking. We wait for the ...”

“... Chris Carduff, who had offered to send her any books she wanted, for a copy of Wild America by Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher. An account of a 30,000-mile journey around the continent by two naturalists, it was originally published in 1955 and was being reissued in memory of Peterson, who had recently ...”

“... in Vietnam. In May 1954, during his Bevanite phase, he declared that ‘not a man, not a gun, must be sent from this country to defend French colonisation in Indo-China … we must not join or in any way encourage an anti-Communist crusade in Asia under the leadership of the Americans or anyone else.’ Later the same day, in a speech in Manchester, he had ...”

“... more freely than a shopping list or a bus ticket. Literary works are peculiarly portable. They can be lifted from one interpretative situation to another, and may change their meaning in the course of this migration. Waiting for Godot as performed in San Quentin prison is not quite the same play as Peter Hall’s first London production. We cannot simply put ...”

“... Innovation, Universities and Skills, announced that research funding for universities was going to be rethought.* The new system should ‘continue to incentivise research excellence’ and reward ‘the quality of researchers’ contribution to public policy-making and to public engagement’. It shouldn’t create ‘disincentives to researchers moving ...”

“... her sharp, sceptical, often laconic version of three plays about the legacy of Atreus, one each by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, as well as in her translations of four other plays by Euripides,* I kept hearing an invitation to extend and refine the thought. These gods are the names of forces humans cannot otherwise ...”

“... policy on the presentation of the past: Article Two required that the slave trade and slavery be taken into account in education policy and research funding. The law was vague as to what exactly would be required, but in 2004 the government formed a Comité pour la mémoire de l’esclavage to devise a programme for use ...”

“... with Burdett-Coutts’s help. He couldn’t tolerate women defying his authority, but he was bored by women who were easily controlled. These conflicts are central to his fiction. If his thinking on questions of gender had been less tangled, he would have been a different and less absorbing writer. It doesn’t come as a surprise to learn that he could treat ...”

“... how powerful a parliamentary presence someone of Lloyd George’s rhetorical gifts could be while also doing justice to his dazzling unscrupulousness. There is no doubt that in the annals of British radicalism there has never been a more romantic or sympathetic figure than Lloyd George, the People’s Chancellor, leading the battle against the House ...”

“... message boards at stieglarsson.com asks the all-important question: ‘What if he is pretending to be dead, and rises again, like Lisbeth from a premature burial?’ The three books that have been published were all completed before Larsson died, a fourth was three-quarters done and there were rough plans for numbers five and six. Apparently, there was going ...”

“... The rise of S.G. Warburg & Co was the most striking feature of the postwar City. Founded by Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in the 1940s, the bank was an awkward upstart in the closed shop of London merchant banking. Through a combination of hard work, professionalism and sheer boldness, it became one of the biggest of the merchant banks, and certainly the most dynamic ...”

“... Whatever​ the outcome of the independence referendum in Scotland this September, it will be followed by an extensive inquest into the workings of the British constitution. In some quarters inquiries have already started. The Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee of the House of Commons issued a report in March last year titled Do We Need a Constitutional Convention for the UK? The Liberal Democrats’ Home Rule and Community Rule Commission has advocated ‘home rule all round’ in a new federal union ...”

“... received a few complaints. Some have stuck in the memory. ‘He made us read a whole book by Hume.’ Or the student in a class on 19th-century intellectual history who grumbled about having to read books from the anthropology and biology sections of the library; surely that wasn’t part of a history degree? A tiny minority of students found fault ...”