“... where such things are more likely to occur. (Two modern editions of the Requiem – those of David Wulstan and Bruno Turner – try to correct the offending octaves in the Benedictus but in doing so introduce two sets of consecutive fifths. It would have been better to leave Victoria with his momentary slip, as Rees does in his new online edition of the ...”

“... On​ 13 May 1397, the visitors came to Ruardean in Gloucestershire. They learned that Nicholas Cuthler was causing a scandal among his neighbours. He had not come to terms with his father’s death and was making strange claims: he went about in public saying that his father’s spirit still walked the village at night ...”

“... It made​ perfect sense that the first port of call on President Trump’s first foreign trip, in May, was Riyadh. Saudi Arabia – the world’s second largest oil producer (after Russia), the world’s biggest military spender as a proportion of GDP, the main sponsor of Islamist fighting groups across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Iraq, the leader of a coalition in a devastating war against Yemeni rebels now in its third year – is a country one can do business with, even as the most ardent Kremlinologists in the West struggle to understand it ...”

“... to the tenets of Islam, they announced, were largely immune from the debt crisis. Devout Muslims may lend and borrow under certain conditions; they can even buy and sell debt in the form of ‘Islamic’ bonds, but most other kinds of debt trading are frowned on. Al Rajhi Bank, based in Saudi Arabia, and the Kuwait Finance House posted impressive profits in ...”

“... that the world does not give us everything we deserve, but warning that any attempt to change it may rob us of what little we have.Mises was not a conservative, however. He was a radical liberal, as he explained at length in 1922 in Die Gemeinwirtschaft (‘The Collective Economy’, translated as Socialism). The book was intended as a refutation of Marxism ...”

“... and that the offender would be sacked. That’s the language of the new Fleet Street tycoons. David Astor, the former editor of the Observer, wrote in a letter to the Times: ‘To allow a newspaper catering to political sector X of our community to be taken over by a proprietor who is a militant member of political sector Y is, plainly, not in the ...”

“... and fiction. Fitzgerald shared with his hero Gatsby an untimely death and barely attended funeral. David Brown’s thorough biography, Paradise Lost, emphasises that Fitzgerald lived with the constant tension between the desire to be a ‘whole man’ and the recognition of its impossibility. His life was full of drama and destruction: reckless spending, high ...”

“... and greeted Henry Kissinger with bear hugs and heavy jokes. When the president came to Moscow in May 1974, he found Brezhnev ‘like a big Irish labour boss’, backslapping at one moment and at the next bellowing with anger (for the benefit of listeners in Hanoi) about the Vietnam War. Here and at Camp David, Nixon was a ...”

“... Boston University. The first of them, a satirical attack on The Old Faith and the New, a work of David Strauss’s dotage (1871, English translation 1873), begins with a memorable disclaimer. The German public’s eagerness to infer from the military victory over France a victory over French culture, Nietzsche writes, is a pernicious delusion, ‘not simply ...”

“... imparted a significance to ideas of identity and destiny, and a faith which, whatever else it may have been, was undeniably creative. It would be – indeed has been – convenient to dismiss Speer’s talents and to regard Schmid-Ehmen’s eagles as kitsch. Later in the exhibition we are able to see what Mukhina might have created in the streamlined ...”

“... and routine rather than self-conscious. This does not preclude great accomplishment; in fact it may encourage it. Every day of the year, in every large English cathedral, choral evensong is sung. The core of what the choristers perform was written at a time when these craft traditions were matched by religious belief, by composers like Tallis, Purcell, Byrd ...”

“... That so little has been written on later 19th-century Manchester, despite Taylor’s invitation, may (for once) be blamed on Asa Briggs, whose excellent Victorian Cities (1963) threw historians off the scent by arguing that Manchester, the ‘shock city’ of the first half of the century, had, by 1877, ‘long outgrown the days when it could be described as ...”

“... take in these new opportunities to taste ‘the pleasures of the imagination’. Georgian England may now, in our culture’s memory, be associated with ‘order, stability and decorum’, but ‘contemporaries saw their culture as modern, not traditional, an indication that their society and way of life was changing. It was its dynamism, variety and ...”

“... identity and needs. At last we Scots have had an opportunity to redress our grievances. On 6 May 1999 we cast our votes for the first Scottish Parliament since the Union of 1707. And almost 42 per cent of the electorate stayed at home. It did rain, I suppose. Since the devolution referendum of 1997, media attention has largely focused on the threat posed ...”

“... a low standard of living – unacceptable. In the UK at that time – happy days – there may have been shortages of food and clothing, but there was also an acute shortage of labour. The so-called ‘flood of immigration’ started, first from the Caribbean and then, in the late Fifties and early Sixties, from the sub-continent of India. The numbers ...”