“... than a hundred parishes to give a base for the period before the accession of Elizabeth I. It may also have been a mistake to have selected parishes by size, for the pattern of child and infant deaths seems to have differed according to the size of the parish. But the Cambridge Group were working with over three million figures, and it would be ...”

“... under the control of the security service. They began to be specially trained for their task in May. It is very difficult to believe, given everything we know about the Nazi state, that this special training could have been initiated without an order from Hitler. It was he who in March made clear to the military that the Russian war would be a war of ...”

“... unburrowed and Abercrombie moved east to rebuild Hong Kong. The name ‘Crossrail’ was coined by David Barran, a monocle-wearing, snuff-snorting industrialist, in a 1974 report drawn up at the request of the Department of the Environment. Barran, like Abercrombie, proposed two tunnels, one from London Bridge to Victoria, the other from Paddington to ...”

“... overwhelming desire to re-establish sovereignty over the peninsula, demilitarised since the Camp David Accords. The extent of the Islamists’ deference to the military was made plain when the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood was forced to retract derogatory remarks he had made about the military’s willingness to bend to the wishes of ...”

“... only of divorce but also of deference and authority. Social historians neglect it at their peril. David Kynaston in Family Britain 1951-57 gives a pretty full account, but in Peter Hennessy’s Having It So Good: Britain in the 1950s the only Peter Townsend in the index is the sociologist of that name. Even Brown does not quite do justice to the ...”

“... political upheavals of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015 and the resignation of David Cameron the following summer. (Theresa May initially hoped to refocus on ‘JAMs’ – Just About Managing families – but lost all ideological confidence along with her parliamentary majority in June last year.) The ...”

“... Like Eggers (whose memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was puffed by Moody), David Foster Wallace and William T. Vollmann, Moody spurns the eye-dropper technique of minimalism that was fashionable when he was a nervous colt in the 1980s in favour of a bachelor-guy pack-rat approach where everything the author has ever seen, read, felt or ...”

“... they included Brian Worthington, a former pupil of Leavis, and, for a short but inspiring time, David Lambert, a man who spoke about poetry and nature with such passion that it was no surprise when he left Clifton to become a gardener. He later c0-founded the Parks Agency and is now a compelling advocate for Extinction Rebellion.Jefferies taught with a ...”

“... make a choice: he asked his wife for a divorce, telling her that ‘Jane needs me more.’ There may already have been signs of a drinking problem that would later become serious; certainly, Comfort felt that Henderson needed his commitment and more of his time. She may have demanded that her place in his life was publicly ...”

“... in public interest terms, motives are generally mixed, only God can see into the heart etc. We may be on firmer ground making distinctions between denunciations on the basis of likely outcomes. Under Stalin during the Great Purges, these included arrest, exile to Gulag and summary execution. While the denunciatory processes of McCarthyism had some ...”

“... some reviewer, next month, ‘gnash his teeth, and storm and rage at me, as some of you did last MAY, (in which I remember the weather was very hot)’, the heated critic should not be exasperated at being treated with ‘good temper’. Like the fly that buzzed around Uncle Toby’s nose all through dinner, he would be allowed to buzz off ...”

“... in 1972, assuring her an attentive hearing from Japan’s huge neighbour. Deeper calculations may have been behind her appointment, however. She was prepared to describe the Foreign Ministry, long believed to be without fault, as ‘a hotbed of corruption’. Japan’s ultra-secretive spook outfit, the Cabinet Research Office, is funded by off-budget ...”

“... over in academia Prince is still the party tape of choice. Publishing ‘like it’s 1999’ may be variously interpreted, but whatever the resulting book is called, the assumption is the same: the end of the millennium is inextricably linked with apocalypse, the end of the world, and the messianic fanatics who seek to bring it about. And so although ...”

“... residents, in common with Palestinians in the rest of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, may neither leave their town nor return to it without written permission from the Israeli authorities. Permits are difficult to obtain and stipulate fixed times of return, after which the holder can be arrested. Like the Israeli settlements of Har Homa and Gilo ...”

“... programmers. The first chess-playing program was written on slips of paper by Alan Turing and David Champernowne in the late 1940s. At the time, it was easy to think that a computer capable of playing a decent game would require a kind of general reasoning capacity, that it might need to make logical deductions, think strategically and learn abstract ...”