“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... only about fashion but about sexual identity, national culture and art history. My slow awakening may well be typical. Whatever their knowledge of the great dress designers – from Worth and Doucet through Poiret and Schiaparelli to Westwood and Miyake – I do not think that many people could name a great tailor or men’s clothes designer who flourished ...”

“... that the first modern act of political terrorism in the region was the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Irgun Zvi Leumi under the leadership of Menachem Begin; the assassinations of Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident, and Count Bernadotte, the UN mediator, by Jewish extremists long preceded that of Anwar Sadat by their Muslim ...”

“... the Beatles, they are post-Marxist in the sense that the Internet comes after the Somme. Hall may dislike trendy theories, but this is a bit like Jeffrey Bernard campaigning against drinking clubs. Whatever his reservations, he does stand for all the Right Things in the arena of cultural studies: impeccably ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Hebrew prayers on stage with a kippah on his head, wore a blazer decorated with the Star of David and, after school, went to classes on the Koran. After his mother died of cancer Begg spent some time being looked after by his father’s non-Muslim girlfriend, Josephine, who introduced him to Christmas stockings, Christmas pudding with silver ...”