“... announcements were upbeat. The new season (which has just opened) would include world premieres by Wayne McGregor, Christopher Wheeldon and Kyle Abraham, alongside classic ballets by Kenneth MacMillan and Frederick Ashton. In May and June, ahead of the full reopening, the company streamed an online programme featuring ...”

“... provinces and states remain the lynchpins of the remarkably successful federal systems bequeathed by their former colonial masters (the same is true, to a lesser extent, of the more centralised Indian constitution). But in the UK itself? Scarcely a sniff. Since Winston Churchill toyed with the idea of reviving the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy in 1913, federalism ...”

“... On​ 1 November 1755 an earthquake in Lisbon, followed by fire and floods, killed between thirty and sixty thousand people. The disaster, all the preachers said, was God’s punishment for sinfulness. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, saw it as divine vengeance for the cruelties of the Portuguese Inquisition ...”

“... Decades​ of resentment in Northern Ireland, ignored by Westminster, finally resulted in 1969 in what are known euphemistically as ‘the Troubles’. Almost three decades of violence followed, with the loss of more than 3500 lives. Operation Banner, the longest continuous deployment by the British army, did not secure peace any more than its counterinsurgency campaigns before and since ...”

“... it ‘the most impudent and scurrilous … thing I ever read’ and urged speedy, crushing action be taken against those responsible. Marlborough was echoing a notorious ruling by Lord Chief Justice Holt, who directed a 1704 jury that if authors ‘cou’d not be call’d to Account for ...”

“... more commonly known as St Patrick’s Purgatory. It’s the setting for a pilgrimage undertaken by thousands of Irish men and women each year. For three days they fast and pray, deprive themselves of sleep, and walk barefoot round the station ‘beds’ – circles of rough stones said to be the remains of monastic ...”

“... doubt well-meaning reports that he had fallen while trying to feed the pigeons, but these should be discounted. Not that he didn’t like pigeons, just as he adored cats and dogs and cows and horses, but his friend, agent and German translator, Susanna Roth, is certain that he meant to end his own life, and dismisses attempts to repurpose his death (often ...”

“... really go to The Last Laugh, the 1959 Cambridge Footlights revue, directed and largely devised by John Bird. CND was just beginning to gather momentum and the show opened with a huge nuclear explosion, following which, in the words of the producer William Donaldson, the audience was treated to a whole evening’s worth of ‘terrible gloomy stuff – the ...”

“... picture-postcards. They show scenes such as that of six men, heavily veiled, veils held down by brimmed hats, posed with long-barrelled rifles. And two men in grass skirts, with feathers in their hair, intent on a game of billiards. They are Africans. And here are twenty-odd white men, in straw boaters, surrounding a prone ...”

“... What​ you can paint depends on what you are allowed to see, which may be controlled by regulation or social convention. So, for instance, at the Paris Opéra in the 1870s, women were not under any circumstances permitted to sit in the orchestre. And they could only sit in the parterre, or rear stalls, if accompanied by a man ...”

“... of water could quell. Our mother usually chose a sickly sweet ochre-coloured korma, now said to be the most popular curry in Britain (having overtaken chicken tikka masala).I’ve never felt quite the same about the charms of curry house curry since I first heard that these ‘Indian’ curries were created by Bangladeshi ...”

“... It​ can be hard, from this distance, to see what all the fuss was about. In his day (a day that, unfortunately for him, ended a decade or so before his death in 1946, a month short of his 80th birthday), H.G. Wells was one of the world’s leading literary and intellectual celebrities. Hailed as ‘a man of genius’ on the appearance of his breakthrough book, The Time Machine (1895), he went on to publish roughly two books a year for the next five decades ...”

“... a young man, Harold Rosenberg and Fried’s own mentor Clement Greenberg, started out wanting to be all-round literati before becoming specialists in the fine arts; but Fried, who was one of the first wave of art critics to have a PhD in art history, seems to have been the only one of that group to have been tempted, however briefly, ...”

“... actually describes the workings of American politics in the raw. Hellfire Nation interrogates, by way of an ultra-revisionist interpretation of American history, the consensus that free markets, limited government, the protection of individual rights and the factional politics of ‘pork’, patronage and spoils, together amount to an adequate summary of ...”

“... concert hall near you. Leaving Parliament in 2001 to devote more time to politics, Benn joined the B-list of political celebrities. He has appeared at the Glastonbury Festival and boasts his own website (www.tonybenn.com). As Tony Blair’s Government spins itself further into policy confusion, the world according to Benn has never seemed clearer. From the ...”