“... and fumes from coal (‘sea-coal’) burned in breweries, bakeries and glass foundries. John Evelyn’s Fumifugium, or, the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated (1661) dismissed the idea that domestic hearths had much to do with it – probably correctly at the time.Evelyn wrote about ‘Clowds of Smoak and Sulphur, so full of ...”

“... and on jihadism itself. In 1990, as the anti-Saddam coalition triumphed in Kuwait, Islamists took solace from the collapse of three of the most disliked secular dictatorships in Africa: Hissène Habré in Chad in December 1990, Siad Barre in Somalia in January 1991 and Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia in May 1991 (precipitating Eritrea’s ...”

“... to enter the kingdom of God.’ The twenty-year-old Melania and her husband, Valerius Pinianus, took Christ at his word. They interpreted their dream as divine encouragement to follow the equally challenging injunction: ‘If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.’ But this was no ...”

“... It took sixty years for the supporters of Crossrail, the new railway being built under London, to convince Parliament it was worth the investment. Recession scuppered the project twice, in the 1970s and 1990s, and slowed it down again in 2009: it was supposed to be finished in time for the Olympics, then budget cuts forced the completion date forward to 2018 ...”

“... and easy acceptance of American limits, is often contrasted with the neocon evangelism that took off after the attacks of 9/11. Kissinger had long served as a foil for the New Right. The secretary of state ‘sounds like Churchill’ but ‘acts like Chamberlain’, Norman Podhoretz wrote in 1976. And even before conservatives came to condemn Kissinger ...”

“... the imagination to ask. There were a few good students in the class, and one exceptional one. He took passive revenge on Mr Deas by becoming an accountant instead of heading for the maths faculty. Others did go on to maths and physics at university. The rest of us scraped through the exam and afterwards forgot everything we had learned. I can still add and ...”

“... impression on him. Their assignations were usually at Ward’s flat in Wimpole Mews, but once he took her to the family house where they made love in front of the television set. Whether or not Profumo was ‘sharing Christine Keeler’s favours’ with the Russian spy – the author’s guess is that lvanov did not quite make it – the ...”

“... in ideas and traducing their concepts in the process. By 1983, the centenary of the birth of both John Maynard Keynes (died 1946) and Joseph Alois Schumpeter (died 1950), it was the less dirigiste Schumpeter, so economists were saying, who spoke to the needs of the hour. The Age of Keynes thus gave way to the Age of Schumpeter, as can be confirmed by ...”

“... committee trying to investigate the deal, Feinstein lasted only three months: the story itself took 18 months to unfold – inevitably, the account he gives is incomplete. The moment of truth for Feinstein should have come earlier, over Aids. He recounts with horror the scene in the ANC parliamentary caucus when Mbeki gave his lecture on Big Pharma and ...”

“... After losing territory to the British in the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852-53, King Mindon took control of the Yenangyaung oil fields – ‘effectively nationalising the industry’ – and did a deal with Price’s Patent Candle Company Ltd of London and Liverpool, selling them two thousand barrels of Burmese oil a month. In 1885, the British ...”

“... whose disadvantages are not only social or physical but cognitive. The volume Dog Fox Field (1990) took its title from a Nazi test for mental function; the title poem is an angry elegy for the ‘feebleminded’: These were no leaders but they were first into the dark on Dog Fox Field: Anna who rocked her head, and Paul who grew big and yet giggled small, Irma ...”

“... note’, in which the dramatist is reported as saying that Christ enjoyed carnal relations with John, the beloved disciple, and that all men who did not love tobacco and boys were fools, Marlowe’s own bias seems unusually clear. Sexual relations between man and man (or man and beast) became a capital offence in England in 1533. Demoted briefly to the ...”

“... and Auden himself evidently felt he had been knocked about a bit. ‘Desmond MacCarthy took me to task severely,’ he told a young admirer back home in New York: ‘He’s the Grand Old Man of English criticism … now the publishers over there are advertising it as “that controversial volume”.’ Auden had endured controversy anyway since his ...”

“... and practice, and about the herd instincts of the City of London, as accurate today as when he took over the magazine a century and a half ago. The Memoirs of Walter Bagehot is an oddity, for Bagehot left behind no memoir when his chronically weak chest finally undid him at the age of 51. Instead, Frank Prochaska has stitched together this self-portrait ...”

“... into a full-blown paranoid belief that the security services were plotting a coup against him. John Major was not far behind. He would leave a cabinet discussion to go and read the latest edition of the Evening Standard in the anteroom, then come back to suggest they begin the discussion again in the light of what the Standard was saying. In his memoirs he ...”