“... media scapegoating. Heath called the ‘Who governs Britain?’ general election, and lost. Harold Wilson’s Labour government then pushed the unions into a policy of supposedly voluntary wage restraint with the Social Contract, while continuing to let unemployment rise and living standards fall. People were ‘once again bemused and confused by the spectacle ...”

“... would not underestimate the romantic reasons why we got into Black Arrow,’ the historian David Wright says. ‘Even people who worked in the Ministry went home and read science fiction, saw science fiction stuffon the TV; they dreamed, too. But there were people, and perhaps the same people, who had to make hard-headed decisions about what would pay ...”

“... across their ancient homeland. Hämäläinen relates the account given to the English explorer David Thompson by one of the Blackfeet Indians, Saahkómaapi. In around 1730, the Blackfeet heard that there were horses in Snake Indian country and that not far away was the body of a horse that had been killed by an arrow. They found the dead horse and gathered ...”

“... The meeting that ensued settled the fate of the island. It was a talk between social-democrats: Wilson, Callaghan and Ecevit, fellow members of the Socialist International. Although Britain had not only a core of well-equipped troops, but overwhelming air-power on the island – fighter-bombers capable of shattering forces far more formidable than Sampson ...”

“... island – the freest and fairest in Singaporean history – which made the Labour Front leader, David Marshall, head of the local advisory board of what remained a British colony. The son of Sephardic Baghdadis, Marshall had been a Japanese POW in the mines of Hokkaido, and had Fabian connections in London. He proposed the creation of a welfare state and ...”

“... the same from one abbey to the next.2 April, Yorkshire. Come across a thirty-year-old note from David Vaisey, at that time a postgraduate student at Bodley and subsequently its Librarian. The note just has a crudely drawn swastika and the slogan ‘A.L. Raus’.14 April. Pass two slightly cheeky-looking middle-aged businessmen in Hanover Square, one of whom ...”

“... their youth and remembering some of the books they read then. There’s Camus and Sartre, Colin Wilson and Lawrence Durrell – not quite the literary equivalent of flares but inducing something of the same incredulity: ‘Did we really read/ wear these?’ I miss the atlas I really wanted and come away with one or two biographies, including a memoir of ...”

“... the Cambridge School of modern architects, such as the British Library’s designer, Colin St John Wilson, who believed in uniting modernism and historical continuity through an engagement with the city as it is, rather than as they would like it to be. Their heroes were Alberti, Palladio, Asplund, Lutyens, Aalto, Kahn, Moneo: architects concerned with ...”

“... a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the unions in the 1960s and 1970s. (Howell was Thatcher’s first energy ...”

“... of the postwar boom in the OECD zone by Anglo-American economists of the Left – Andrew Glyn, David Gordon and others – and totalised a phase of world history under it. The notion, as always and as he himself concedes, is a retrospective one: treasure discovered after the event. It is amid the rubble of the Landslide that what preceded it appear ...”

“... to believe in a peculiar kind of democratic and antiseptic war’, he warned a year before Woodrow Wilson took America into the First World War, should understand that ‘willing war means willing all the evils that are organically bound up with it.’Bourne lost his battle: most of his peers were infected with the war spirit. The United States emerged from ...”

“... like the pockets of comic relief in Shakespearean tragedy. It is far larger and more defining. In David Hawkes’s translation of The Dream, an achievement surpassing Scott Moncrieff’s or later English versions of Proust in the art of delivering one cultural world – a much stranger one – into another, not only is the wit no barrier to an Anglophone ...”

“... Honeysuckle and the Bee’. Not everyone likes this extraordinary story. Both Angus Wilson and Kingsley Amis have protested at its terse, incomprehensible oddity, and called it frankly bad. But most other admirers of Kipling, and indeed of good fiction in general, find it in its strange way consummate, haunting and powerful. But a powerful ...”

“... Natalie Rolls, also a Blyth councillor, didn’t return my calls. The town’s Reform mayor, David Swinhoe, was also shy. Nor could I reach the most prominent Reform councillor from Blyth, Barry Elliott, the Trump-like figure who came second to Ronnie Campbell in 2015 and who beat Deirdre Campbell in this year’s county council elections. Elliott is a ...”