“... of the First World War moved the centre of political gravity further towards Westminster. It took World War Two to finish off the municipal spirit. In its wake came state collectivism. The nationalisations of the Attlee Administration gravely worried the defenders of local government. ‘You have only to look around the world today to find that efforts ...”

“... if we were some sort of archaeological dig’. All ambitious politicians primp in some fashion. John Edwards, one of Hillary’s rivals for the Democratic nomination, was recently in trouble for allegedly paying between $400 and $1000 for a haircut. As a woman, however, she faces more sustained and malicious pressure in regard to her appearance, a subject ...”

“... though the inner circle of his admirers was composed of dummies: Berlin, Betjeman, Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, as well as, a little later, Noel Annan and Stuart Hampshire – all capable of the odd spot of talking themselves. But they acknowledged Bowra as their master, which was fortunate since no other terms were on offer. With the young, Bowra’s ...”

“... of a good time’ or ‘I’ll be damned if I’ll do that.’ From Dionysius the Areopagite, he took a dual understanding of God as both transcendent (definable only by what he is not) and immanent (all things are an imperfect image of him). He declared that this meant there were two paths to God: the ascetic and ‘negative’ Way of Rejection, and the Way ...”

“... not expect good marriages or genteel occupations. Matilda disappears from the records while Eliza took care of her grandmother in her old age, dying herself at 30. The ‘moonlight shades’ and their mother stand for the women, black and brown, whose near invisibility, yet absolute centrality to the system of slavery, speak to the silences of the archive and ...”

“... but the most interestingly historical of them, Y Gododdín, does so only tangentially. Whatever John Morris and Leslie Alcock may have written in the 1970s and 1980s, the evidence provides ‘no space … for an “Age of Arthur” during which a victorious British emperor-like figure held back the barbarian hordes’. That image really dates back to the ...”

“... some time between 1859 and 1919, the world contracted a disease which no one ever took the trouble to diagnose because the symptoms were too subtle – blending in with the events of history, no different one by one but altogether – fatal.’ On this model, and on our topic, we might say something like: Suppose some time between 1895 (when ...”

“... and went, rightly, for astronomical fixes wherever possible. But even here error crept in. As John Noble Wilford reminds us, ‘even as late as 1740, it was estimated that not more than 116 places on earth had been correctly located by astronomical observation.’ When we also recall that Ptolemy had no method of accurate time-keeping, we can only marvel ...”

“... church (four services a day, six on Sundays), part tourist attraction, since the 1590s – when John Donne, not yet dean of St Paul’s, recorded that one of the vergers was charging visitors to see the royal tombs. The crucial events were the Reformation, when it lost its monks and lands and found its finances insecure, and Elizabeth I’s subsequent ...”

“... so courteous as to be practically indistinguishable from his butler’. So the next morning they took the precaution of leaving Widener’s car a quarter of a mile from Barnes’s house. When they arrived, the door was opened and, ‘after careful scrutiny by a man who could be properly described as a roughneck (one could have struck a match on his neck), we ...”

“... victory. This was later challenged by historians on the right such as Correlli Barnett and John Charmley, who claimed that the war was a calamity for Britain, with consequences from near national bankruptcy and humiliating dependence on American financial support to industrial decline, Soviet domination of much of Europe and the loss of empire.But ...”

“... then subjugated other continents, French and above all British colonisers and their home audiences took the Athenian line. Cultural and physical differences became rungs on a moral ladder. Being ‘heathen’ and not Christian kept most strangers near the ladder’s foot. But the English added another rung: mockery. Wearing grass skirts, worshipping ...”

“... the prism. No one around you can see it – it’s almost a hallucination. David Hockney, who took up drawing with a modern camera lucida in 1999, described it in Secret Knowledge (2001) as projecting not ‘a real image of the subject, but an illusion of one in the eye’:At first I found the camera lucida very difficult to use … When you move your ...”

“... state.) Stern’s ancestors on both sides were among the great and the good. One, Sigismund Asch, took part in the 1848 revolution, was jailed for his liberal commitment, and went on to become a city councillor in Breslau and a revered citizen. He took special care to treat the indigent in his medical practice. One of ...”

“... the freehold of Skyline Chambers. The plain low-ceilinged rooms are decorated with paintings he took from his flat, along with a metre-long model of the Titanic, a childhood obsession, but most of his belongings are still in Skyline. He can see it from his new balcony, a seven-storey block faced in timber and what looks like red brick but is, in ...”