“... lie expanses of countryside. The trams click through moorland dotted with sedge and rushes, past woods and farms. I saw a wild deer grazing by the tracks. Towns such as Bury are nominally in Burnham’s fiefdom, but the boroughs prize their distinct identities and have their own powers. The inner boroughs of Manchester have the money and fancy jobs, the big ...”

“... European Monetary System to counteract the destabilising effects of the collapse of the Bretton Woods order, when fixed exchange rates disintegrated in the first deep post-war recession. Created outside the framework of the Community, the EMS was imposed by France and Germany against resistance even within the Commission, as the first attempt to control the ...”

“... spectacular ways of showing what their product could do. At an exhibition in San Antonio in 1876, John Gates (then just an agent for the manufacturers, later an iron magnate in his own right) sealed off part of the town’s central plaza with barbed-wire fencing and packed it with dozens of fierce-looking longhorn steers. When the animals charged the ...”

“... a woman to redeem her sexual transgression has. In Much Ado about Nothing, Claudio is told by Don John on the eve of his wedding that Hero has been unfaithful to him: ‘It would better fit your honour to change your mind.’ Wrongly accused at the ceremony, Hero faints to the ground, apparently dead. When she revives, her father, Leonato, exclaims: Do not ...”

“... hostility to the Community. She was still strong enough to ensure that her favoured successor, John Major, took over, but it soon became clear that he had no more intention than Lawson or Howe of hewing to her vision of Europe. With scarcely over a year in office behind him, Major signed the Treaty of Maastricht, after negotiating an opt-out from the ...”

“... far deep because I hadn’t eaten for so long … I was worried that if I was to bury her in the woods, potentially an animal could, you know, find her and potentially do something to her limbs so I didn’t want that to happen.’ She described how they covered Victoria’s body with earth inside the bag, and she spoke in halting detail of the burden she ...”

“... I see his loving gaze falling on the objects in it: a conch shell on a side table, a painting by John Piper (a wedding gift). Home is never a neutral place, it is a very specific context, an animated expression of the presence it contains. Why can’t it be loved?‘You can’t love an inanimate object.’ I don’t know where he got the sentence from. My ...”

“... in the county were killed for want of fodder. By the end of winter in this period, according to John Higgs’s The Land (1964), every blade of grass had been eaten and the animals were forced to follow the plough looking for upturned roots.The social structure of the country had changed, the population had grown, the plough had been improved, the threshing ...”

“... except in such recherché musical circles as the coterie around Nadia Boulanger in Paris or by John Cage’s epigoni everywhere. Roldan, also a remarkable conductor, died of a skin cancer in the face in his early thirties. Cruelly deformed, in his last performances he had to climb the podium wearing a silk mask. Caturla, a country judge who used to compose ...”

“... 1973, when ‘Arab aggressors’ in the Middle East imposed an embargo on Europe, and the Bretton Woods system finally collapsed. In this dual crisis, van Middelaar writes, ‘the member states did not transfer their political voice to the institutions of the inner sphere as a way of becoming better able to respond to the demands of the outside ...”

“... to forgive him for it. I colluded by trying to think of the roads, and the houses, and the woods where I grew up as part of some leafy French or German suburb, Neuilly-sur-Seine, or Wannsee, or Schwabing, where the air is perennially fresh. Where I actually lived was the first issue over which I asked myself whether reality mattered, or how much. As to ...”