“... campaign, Jesse Jackson proclaimed himself ‘the general in this war to fight drugs’; Charles Rangel, Harlem’s longest-serving congressional representative and one of the most powerful figures in New York’s black political machine, was second to none in his opposition to drug decriminalisation. There were 130 police departments led by black ...”

“... who can keep going longest. But it does. That is one of the clear lessons from the first volume of Charles Moore’s exhaustive and exhausting authorised biography of Margaret Thatcher, which takes the story up to the Falklands War in 1982. The person on display here is not more intelligent than her rivals, or more principled. She chops and changes as much as ...”

“... the Thatcher government like Douglas Hurd and William Waldegrave as well as her private secretary Charles Powell, and the late Yehudi Avner, who was Israel’s ambassador in London between 1983 and 1988. When she became prime minister a number of pressing questions faced Thatcher at home and abroad: the economy, the unions, Ulster, Rhodesia, the Cold War in ...”

“... At Cam Ranh Bay naval base, black servicemen revolted when white soldiers celebrated the death of Martin Luther King by raising the Confederate flag. The US military leadership fumblingly tried to accommodate the growing number of Black Power activists in Vietnam – military bureaucrats started investigating commanders who did not allow black troops to wear ...”

“... polls predicted (as usual) but no better in seats won. Only 20 seats changed hands – or 21 if Martin Bell’s old seat of Tatton is included. The Conservatives had the largest turnover – winning nine seats but losing eight. Labour was the biggest loser over all – it lost eight and won two – and the Liberal Democrats gained the most, losing two and ...”

“... to whom all sorts of rumour could be attributed, a twisted figment of the public’s imagination. Martin Doherty makes it clear in Nazi Wireless Propaganda (2000) that outbreaks of Haw-Haw scare stories recurred throughout the war, at moments of maximum stress: after the defeats of 1942, during the air-raids of that year, and with the first use of flying ...”

“... sequence of letters between a farmhand, Emily Chitticks, and her sweetheart, Private Will Martin; five of the 23 letters she wrote were returned, inscribed KILLED. In one, she told him: ‘I have dreamt that you were back home with me dear and the most strange thing about them, you are always in civilian clothes when I dream of you & and I have never ...”

“... most of these men were Spanish. Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón was fifty when the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V mandated his expedition to Chicora, in present-day South Carolina, which slave raiders claimed was a ‘New Andalusia’. Ayllón funded the voyage himself, banking on future dividends. Like other colonisers he hoped to establish a silk industry, since ...”

“... sent tamed exotic birds back to Europe as precious gifts. In 1518, Alonso de Zuazo sent Emperor Charles V parrots, turkeys, hawks and falcons. In 1525, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo sent the emperor ‘thirty or more parrots’, most of which ‘could speak very well’. They didn’t just send birds: in 1528, Hernán Cortés arranged the delivery of a ...”

“... He certainly started out in different circles. After university he became a research assistant to Charles Kennedy, then an SDP MP. Marshall himself stood in Fulham on an SDP-Liberal ticket in 1987, but finished a distant third. He kept up an interest in politics, founding a City branch of Liberal Democrat supporters in the mid-1990s and paying for party ...”

“... round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less perilous, I would have thought, to have a leader ...”

“... with power divided between controllers, strand editors and regional department heads. Troy Kennedy Martin’s 1985 anti-nuclear six-parter Edge of Darkness was commissioned by the head of serials, Jonathan Powell, produced by the Birmingham regional drama head, Michael Wearing, and scheduled before Martin had finished the ...”

“... carried on the struggle, but the impetus was lost. At the Battle of Poitiers in October 732, Charles Martel’s forces marked the end of the first Muslim century by inflicting a sobering defeat on the soldiers of the Prophet: naval bases remained in the South of France – at Nice and Marseille, for example – but, for now, Islam was largely confined to ...”

“... with reserve, fitted into a preconceived pattern which differs little from that laid down by Martin Esslin a generation ago, with its presentation of a man caught between the twin evils of Communism and Fascism. The most interesting part of Hayman’s book deals with Brecht’s early life in Augsburg, which the biographer clearly finds more congenial ...”

“... Darker jokes, which do have to do with the appetite for violence, flicker around memories of Charles Manson. Mickey worries that his TV ratings are lower than those for a Manson programme, but consoles himself: ‘Yeah, it’s pretty hard to beat the king.’ A group of interviewees for the TV show, identified in the screenplay simply as ‘three ...”