“... people want to watch something on BBC4, they seem to be able to find it – lending support to Lord Burns’s idea of a top-sliceable licence fee, in which the public service product of all existing terrestrial channels is met by licence fee money, divided up by a regulator. (Burns was an independent adviser on the Charter Review.) For the group that ...”

“... of British Paintings in the National Gallery is her dissection of the hunting gear worn by Lord Ribblesdale in Sargent’s famous portrait. Though he seems the epitome of high fashion, in this as in much else he isn’t typical and certainly isn’t wearing what the well-dressed Master of Foxhounds might have chosen but an assemblage of favourite ...”

“... inferno.The trail to this conflagration was laid on 7 July, when London dispatched the future law lord Cyril Radcliffe to Delhi to determine the boundaries of the two states, India and Pakistan, to be given independence five weeks later, on 15 August. He knew nothing of the subcontinent. But there already existed a detailed plan to divide it, drawn up in 1946 ...”