“... society’s early members included David Cecil, Roger Fry, J.B.S. Haldane, Julian Huxley, Augustus John, Keynes, Shaw, St Loe Strachey, Ellen Terry and Wells. Stories appeared in the press about ‘the big cars, the women in striking hats, the well-known Bloomsbury figures making themselves conspicuous in the audience with their unconventional dress and loud ...”

“... I recently​ took part in a research project prompted by the government-sponsored campaign of 2013, when Theresa May was home secretary, in which vans carried billboards bearing the words ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.’ In order to understand how such a thing as that billboard could have come about, we felt we needed some insight into the mindset of the Home Office and its officials ...”

“... Around​ forty years ago, a friend of mine took his own life in the middle of a party he was throwing in his apartment. A neighbour who happened to look outside saw him climb onto the window ledge, hesitate briefly and then jump to his death from the fifth floor. His guests were stunned when the police rang at the door ...”

“... secure a majority in a Northern Irish parliament. Sinn Féin won 27 seats to the DUP’s 28, and took three of Fermanagh’s five seats, deposing Foster’s DUP colleague Lord Morrow. The results gave a considerable boost to the parties opposed to Brexit.Thirty thousand people cross the Irish border every day for work. Farmers in the border areas rely ...”

“... Truman as president and inherited the Mossadegh problem. The new administration – which included John Foster Dulles as secretary of state and his brother Allen, now director of the CIA – largely endorsed the views of the outgoing team. In a memo written at the beginning of March assessing the situation in Iran, Allen Dulles advised Eisenhower that ‘a ...”

“... composition by the Florentine painter Andrea del Sarto, showing the Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist. The original has been in Rome since about 1790, possibly much earlier, and many copies are recorded. The image beneath the portrait is somewhat smaller than the one in Rome. It is known that in 1517 Sarto painted a picture of an unspecified ...”

“... union will never be the same again. A saucy genie of empowerment has escaped from the bottle. As John Curtice wrote in the Herald in July, ‘all the lives of everyone in Scotland have been affected by the devolved government in a way they’ve frankly not been in the previous 21 years of devolution.’ The Anglo-Scottish union was under new strain ...”

“... be sure. Emperor Domitian tortured flies; Louis XI did the same to stags; Archduke Franz Ferdinand took pride in having killed more than half a million animals, including the 2150 pieces of small game he bagged in one day and the 3000th stag he shot shortly before Gavrilo Princip shot him. Through the centuries, in Britain and across Europe, cats had the ...”

“... even though he ‘read every pertinent document in every available archive’.But then, in 2011, John Tofik Karam, a young scholar working on the Arab diaspora in Brazil, published a piece in Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. Karam had come across the Paraguay programme while researching Arab migrations to South America. He was relieved to hear ...”

“... We located her on our passive sonar and sighted her visually early in the afternoon of 1 May. We took up a position astern, and followed the General Belgrano for over thirty hours. We reported we were in contact with her. Gavshon and Rice in fact assert that Conqueror first picked up Belgrano on signals before 1600 hours on Friday 30 April, and that she ...”

“... The constituency included Hull University, which had an active New Left led by academics such as John Saville, a historian and founder with E.P. Thompson of the New Reasoner, a forerunner to New Left Review. Many trade unionists and working-class Labour supporters, who Gott hoped would be responsive to his criticisms of Wilson’s leadership, also lived in ...”

“... more explicit. It was only in South Florida, I believe, that Republican Party campaign workers took to distributing bumper-stickers which read – in Spanish, of course: ‘Liberty versus Communism; Reagan-Bush ’84.’ And even today, whatever people may think in other regions of the United States, Miami remains unrepentantly, exuberantly Reagan ...”

“... of San Domenico in Cortona, Arezzo. Once he became a friar, Angelico’s career as a painter took off: he received a steady stream of commissions both from within the order and beyond it. One advantage of his dual calling was that he could work without having to follow the rules or pay the fees of the painters’ guild. For the next fifteen or so ...”

“... Looking through the photographs I took in Tewkesbury in May, I found two pictures of Chuck Pavey and his floodwater hand. There’s Pavey, a 66-year-old retired electrician in a Manchester United hooded top, a wispy white pageboy haircut and dark glasses, standing by a wall on the bank of the River Avon. He’s holding his right hand horizontally in the air, about thirty centimetres above the top of the wall, which comes up to his waist ...”

“... in the national revival that I saw taking place’. In 1972 a year’s Guggenheim fellowship took him to Beirut, where the PLO had set up headquarters after being forced out of Jordan. There he renewed his connection with a friend from Harvard, Hanna Mikhaïl, who had given up an academic career in the US to become a PLO cadre, taking the name Abu ...”