“... junior, Jacob de Vos, into the leading role.De Vos’s star witness was a professor of philosophy, Andrew Murray. Murray was intended to confer an air of objectivity on the state’s case by explaining to the three judges the insurrectionary ideology lurking in the ANC’s reformist prose. He spent three catastrophic weeks under cross-examination by lawyers as ...”

“... different angles on many of the same issues and individuals. Haydon is there, at the Coronation of George IV, a figure in the crowd, describing the ‘silken roar’ as it rose. The Carlyles trail glumly through the chapter on building, hunting for a suitable house. With the exception of a disappointing essay on the theatre the accounts interconnect and ...”

“... Bill Deedes, a kindly, urbane but ineffectual man, who boasted that he never gave anyone orders. Andrew Knight, former editor of the Economist and Black’s new chief executive and plenipotentiary in London, recommended Max Hastings as Deedes’s successor. Though only 40, Hastings was already an established military historian and a reporter of formidable ...”

“... vernacular in England, Scots Baronial was the required whimsy north of the Border, though not for Andrew Carnegie, whose massy Skibo Castle was ‘aesthetically parasitic’. At Stornoway the opium trader Sir James Matheson erected a battlemented fortalice, Lews Castle, above the harbour. ‘Thanks to the fondness of the Chinese for narcotics,’ we are ...”

“... In 1729, with the immortal Newton two years dead, a London mathematics teacher and draughtsman, Andrew Motte, even managed to bring out an English translation of the whole of his greatest work. There has never, until now, been another. It has understandably taken the Harvard historian of science I. Bernard Cohen and his collaborators much longer to produce ...”

“... him, engravers who processed his illustrations and, to wrap things up, a ‘lost entry’ in George Eliot’s journal, recording ‘Mr Thackeray’s passing’. This last was clearly inspired by Peter Ackroyd’s imaginary conversation between Chatterton, T.S. Eliot, Dickens and Oscar Wilde in his biography of the Great Inimitable. By such ...”

“... law were already part of the Tippett family mythology. In 1898 Tippett’s paternal grandfather, George, and his father, Henry, were arrested on charges of obtaining money under false pretences. Henry had an alibi and was discharged, but George was sentenced to nine months in Pentonville Prison, where he fell ill, dying ...”

“... examination shows it to be more sinister: it is seemingly the house magazine of the Society of St George and dedicated to the preservation of the English identity. A second number comes today, more virulent than the last with columns of correspondence all fervently opposed to the European connection, denouncing Labour (and half the Conservatives) as ...”

“... which reached him and went down well. The first came when he and his wife Jane went to stay with George Barker, in Italy I think, and Barker exclaimed afterwards: ‘That boy! He’s got a tiger in his loins!’ Karl loved that. Who wouldn’t? His friends all got to hear about it. He laughed about it in a deprecating way but inside I think he felt that ...”

“... I asked him to tell me about his family history a glint appeared in Jim’s eye. ‘My grandfather George was born in 1860,’ he said, ‘and he worked as a butcher and a restaurant owner up in London, near St Paul’s. My father was Arch Fordham and he started a farm in Berkshire, but my mother, Elsie, who was born in 1901, her family was called ...”

“... audiences in municipal venues in English towns, where his fans sat peaceably as slides showed George Soros with reptilian eyes, in a corona of hellfire, with the caption: ‘George Soros: Personification of Evil.’ Covid-19 has boosted his profile. In May, following an appeal from the Centre for Countering Digital ...”

“... societies in history still comes as a shock to some. In a widely circulated essay in the Atlantic, George Packer claimed that ‘every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.’ In fact, the state has been AWOL for decades, and the market has been entrusted with the tasks most societies reserve ...”

“... stretched from Hardy through to Larkin and Hughes, and to Hughes’s successor as poet laureate, Andrew Motion, whose first critical book was a study of Thomas (though this genealogy had to overlook his Welsh ancestry, and the fact that it took an American’s urgings and practice to get him writing poetry at all). Longley grumbles about the ...”

“... didn’t last very long, or mean very much; the long-haired, anti-authority look was designed by Andrew Loog Oldham to offer a commodified contrast with the Beatles, and there’s no end of whining in Life about how the police were out to get them, and busted them just because they took drugs and were famous, for all the world as if being ‘dangerous’ was ...”

“... necklace of pleasure palaces; the most spectacular being the Trocadero, a 3500-seater designed by George Coles and featuring the largest Wurlitzer organ in Europe. The Elephant was universally acknowledged as ‘the Piccadilly Circus of South London’ and stood at the heart of a satellite belt of 42 active cinemas. Beside the Coronet, now a ‘multi-media ...”