“... off with a set of ‘queries’ that might form suitable topics for polite conversation. ‘May not the harmony and discord of Colours arise from the proportions of the vibrations propagated through the fibres of the optick Nerves,’ he asked winningly, ‘as the harmony and discord of sounds arise from the proportions of the vibrations of the ...”

“... Journalism) to more than 90 per cent of all the deaths in drone strikes (the ex-military officers David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum). In March 2012, the New York Times reported that all military-age males, armed or unarmed, are considered to be combatants unless there is posthumous evidence proving otherwise; the Obama administration recently disputed ...”

“... Woodrow Wyatt later gloated that he had fixed this as go-between from Murdoch to Thatcher, and he may have been right. As soon as he had the papers, Murdoch began rearranging their editors, with Evans shunted from Sunday to daily, a mistake in itself, and telling them what to do, and what to write. At the time Evans pretended that Murdoch didn’t dictate ...”

“... out on – is the principal theme of the next two instalments, Falling towards England (1985) and May Week Was in June (1990). Written as his TV fame reached its peak, these books – scrappier than the first, and more ingratiatingly flip – get less enjoyable as qualities he’s prouder of start falling into place. Part of the problem with instalments two ...”

“... George VI​ was crowned on 12 May 1937, a hundred years, less six weeks, after his great-grandmother Victoria succeeded to the throne. At 18 the new queen had been full of confidence. Her first action was to move her bed out of her mother’s room and have Sir John Conroy, her mother’s intimate adviser, banished from court ...”

“... hostility towards Europe, which only reinforced the wider electorate’s allergy to what Theresa May described, when she was party chairman, as the – perceived – ‘nasty party’. But did any leader or electoral strategist really have much room for manoeuvre? Bale is acutely sensitive to the ways in which previous choices and established institutional ...”

“... content. Insofar as form and language detain him, they detain him as questions of ideology. It may be for this reason that he seems to prefer drama to poetry and fiction, and that he praises ‘the particularly rapid progress of English drama’ in this period. (Drama, being more openly political than either fiction or poetry, is more progressive.) Just as ...”

“... Moscow, where he cultivated a Byronic image and gained a reputation for insolence. He fell in with David Burlyuk, a Cubist painter who recognised his poetic talent, and the two of them got together with the avant-garde poets Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh to release the first Futurist almanac, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. They announced that ...”

“... sinister ones. Sent to bed while one of his older cousins read aloud from the first instalment of David Copperfield, he managed to hide himself and listen breathlessly – only to give the game away when he burst into loud sobs of sympathy ‘under the strain of the Murdstones’. The small James surrendered with equal readiness to the magic of the ...”

“... Cecil, a rising royal secretary, is protective towards Elizabeth, mindful of the role history may have in store for her. Shardlake is retained as one of her lawyers. Now 47, he is lonely, world-weary, and bored of drawing up conveyances and wills (perhaps as Sansom was before he packed in the law). He clings fondly to the idea of the commonwealth, defined ...”

“... listening posts and much of the signals intelligence they collect. A reader of a Five Eyes brief may not know which state has collected the information they’re looking at without consulting the technical data. The NSA is by far the most powerful signals intelligence agency in the world, but global surveillance is a shared effort of the Anglosphere.The ...”

“... as the major channel into this country for the theories of the European Enlightenment – or so David Watkin’s generous reading of Soane’s muddled (and, at the time, scarcely audible) Royal Academy lectures would suggest. These rival claims to Soane’s legacy are neatly captured, and subverted, in a cartoon currently on show in Sir John Soane’s ...”

“... and supercharged sound systems. The fun lasted a while longer before the final crackdown. On a May bank holiday in 1992, several traveller convoys passing through the West Country were herded over to West Mercia, where local police had little experience of dealing with raves. The super-convoy converged on Castlemorton Common, just outside Malvern. Sound ...”

“... known as ‘rockets’, moving in a single direction with no prospect of a return journey.Museveni may have opened the door, but the constitution of 1995 entrenched the barrier against citizenship for non-indigenous applicants, who now had to belong to an indigenous group. Schedule 3 of the constitution included a list of ‘indigenous’ tribes. By this ...”

“... families. This budget helps hardworking people keep more of the money they have earned. His boss, David Cameron, criticising Labour in Parliament last month: They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais, they said they could all come to Britain. The only people they never stand up for are the British people and hardworking taxpayers. The former Conservative ...”