“... Kathleen Glynn, who has produced all his films. Next came his disastrous editorship of Mother Jones, the muckraking San Francisco magazine, from which he was fired after five months (Moore says that there was a disagreement about how to cover the Sandinistas, but it seems that Moore had also alienated most of the staff and consistently failed to meet ...”

“... though his analogy was the bell jar rather than the greenhouse – and proved experimentally by John Tyndall in 1859. In the 19th century it could be seen as unambiguously a good thing: if carbon dioxide and other trace gases didn’t trap heat in the atmosphere, the earth wouldn’t be warm enough to support life as we know it. But there is now far more ...”

“... a stetson, jodhpur-like trousers and tall leather boots. He looks like an Edwardian Indiana Jones, or some strange dystopian scoutmaster living half-wild in the woods. Fellow explorers described him as having an ‘indomitable will’ and ‘infinite resource’, a man ‘in hand to hand combat with the wilderness’. In Conan Doyle’s South American ...”

“... points are the Greeks, the Gothic of Chartres, the Georgian terrace and the English Renaissance of Jones and Wren, which are admired but not venerated. Wren appears inside St Paul’s, a Baroque feature in himself with curly wig and generous embonpoint, surveying the dome through a spyglass. Arriving at the present, Lancaster watches it go past on the ...”

“... for taking bribes. Edwards was known to drink with one messenger, his fellow Welshman William Jones, and probably greased other palms. His luck ran out in 1696 with The Anti-Curse, a broadside poem attacking the ‘damn’d rebellious brood’ who ‘basely did King James depose’, which attracted a heavy fine and three alarming hours in the pillory. His ...”

“... of Mansfield’s ‘wife’, the ever-devoted Ida Baker whom Mansfield referred to variously as ‘Jones’, ‘the Mountain’ and ‘the slave’, whom she said often she hated and once said she thought of shooting with her revolver, and whom she would not allow to touch her. This modern ‘we know better’ tone in dealing with the elderly survivors seems ...”

“... a uniter, not a divider,’ said George W., the candidate who spoke at the segregated Bob Jones University. Not according to the map: the division preceded the vote, but the vote confirmed it. The results also show a gender gap. Thank God women have more sense than men; too bad there aren’t more of them, or they can’t vote twice. Bush rode ...”

“... where no sun shines;/Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart/Push in their tides,’ Glyn Jones, a sceptical friend, ventured that it ‘probably expresses something pretty trite and commonplace, in prose terms, about the foetus and the pre-natal state’. That puts it harshly, but Jones was shrewd to pick up on the ...”

“... the country in search of old records that a handful of them – Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt – were ‘rediscovered’. They became draws on the coffee-house and festival circuit, while recordings by John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, who had made their names playing house-rocking, amplified ...”

“... political history this century, from Rufus Isaacs to Horatio Bottomley to Maundy Gregory to John Poulson, is littered with great corruption stories. The explanation for the increase in sleaze under Thatcher and Major is not to be found in any particular scandal, nor in the sudden susceptibility of certain individuals to corruption. Contemporary sleaze ...”

“... playhouses were probably closed two-thirds of the time. Biographers, notably Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jonathan Bate, have struggled to determine the impact plague had on Shakespeare’s life and work. Did Shakespeare flee London during extended outbreaks, and so spend much of the first decade of the 17th century with his family in Stratford? Did he ...”

“... would have extended our broadcasts in a number of ways to different languages,’ recalls John Tusa, who ran the World Service from 1986 to 1992, ‘but because the FCO had this ludicrous power of prescription they’d say no. And we’d say there’s an audience there, there’s a need there. And then sometimes when a crisis developed they’d ...”

“... escape the matricidal trauma? An influential chorus of unreconstructed Tory journalists fingered John Major for ‘the ultimate crime of not being Margaret Thatcher’, and he became, in the words of the late Hugo Young, ‘a permanently contingent leader’. But he was not alone. Since Major no post-Thatcher Tory has been wholeheartedly accepted throughout ...”

“... those of the novelist E.M. Delafield, whose Diary of a Provincial Lady was the ancestor of Bridget Jones. There was a sense of relief at emerging into a world from which the constraints of the Edwardian age had been blown away. The loss of 880,000 men meant that many women would never marry, but they would have the vote and they would have unprecedented ...”

“... to two such ventures: the Bedford estate, whose involvement in urban development ran from Inigo Jones’s highly innovative Covent Garden Piazza in the 1630s, via the creation of Bloomsbury’s Georgian delights, to the development of Figs Mead, a model lower-class suburb, in the 1830s; and the Foundling Hospital estate, to the east of Bloomsbury, developed ...”