“... matters have been improving. In 1980, there was even a small surplus, only partly owing to North Sea oil. As for food prices, 90 per cent of the rise since 1973 is due to Western inflation and soaring energy prices. What’s hit the British economy is not Community membership, but world slump. It would be worse outside. So, patiently, the Community’s ...”

“... our last conversation, I often find myself nostalgically drifting back to West Parade. The hellish North Sea wind tore through the third-floor apartment every day and I thought: wonderful, only lunatics would attend a university in Norwich. We had one of those rusted paraffin heaters, a huge, clanging metal beast with German markings that defeated its intended ...”

“... local opposition. Walter Gropius gathered an extraordinary group around him: Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Marcel Breuer, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy. The Bauhaus had its internal divisions and idiosyncrasies, but the six years it was located in Weimar were some of its most successful. In August and September 1923, a large ...”

“... Democratic Unionist Party, Jeffrey Donaldson, instructed the first minister of Northern Ireland, Paul Givan, to resign. This automatically also removed the deputy first minister, Sinn Féin’s Michelle O’Neill, from office, effectively bringing about the collapse of the power-sharing administration. Donaldson claimed to be protesting at the failure of the ...”

“... opposition, it was this fear that drove a motley crew of deputies – including Bertrand Barère, Paul Barras, Jacques-Nicolas Billaud-Varenne, Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, Lazare Carnot and Jean-Lambert Tallien – to topple him. They did so by means of a hasty coup on 9 Thermidor, the day after his speech. The key events are well known. Robespierre’s ...”

“... those who suggest that it falls a long way below international terrorism of the al-Qaida variety, North Korea, the Israel/Palestine conflict, the Indo/Pakistan arms race, Southern Africa, international crime (including the drugs against which Mr Blair declared war before he did so on terrorism) and conservation of the environment. We are still involved in ...”

“... celebrated Micheaux’s successful reinvention and proposed the black settlement of the North-West. Micheaux followed Washington’s bootstraps philosophy and published and distributed The Conquest himself, embarking on an aggressive round of personal appearances in black communities. His second book, The Forged Note: A Romance of the Darker Races ...”

“... if Northrop Frye played video games. It’s true that it’s difficult to imagine the doyen of North American literary criticism with his pouchy features shivering over the levers while the reflected white-line paddles of Pong tracked up and down his spectacle lenses; yet when it – the first true video game – hit the arcades, Frye was just sixty. Such ...”

“... of John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin; the libertarian narcissism of the 1960s; Paul Watson’s 1974 BBC series about the Wilkins clan, The Family, ‘reality television’ in general and Big Brother in particular; the Bloomsburyite economist J.M. Keynes (whose name Blond revealingly pronounced as ‘Keens’ in a televised debate that I ...”

“... Town. So I went to visit it. When you walk in, you wonder if you’ve somehow wandered into a North London satellite of Tate Modern. Unlike most receptions, Reception here appears eager to offer you a decent reception, and the building is full of colour, light, optimism and efficiency. People smile. It’s a palace, actually, or a modern church of the ...”

“... that they were not training manuals for life.’ At eight he was sent away to prep school, North Foreland Court in Kent, which ‘took seriously its duty of preparing small boys for life’s unpleasantness’, and where he was predictably miserable. He went from there to Eton, at a time – the 1960s – when it was still turning out ‘prefects rather ...”

“... they were never going to be able to penetrate the narrow alleyways of the sprawling slums in the north and west of the city. In most cases they didn’t even try. Muqtada’s forces responded, as they have in the past when facing an attack in one place, by spreading the battle to Baghdad and every other city and town where their forces are strong. Local ...”

“... to Rio is called Lady Metroland. Her husband, Viscount Metroland, takes his ‘funny name’ (as Paul Pennyfeather sees it) from a fantasy fiefdom of the London Metropolitan Railway, an advertising man’s conceit which tickled the imagination of the public in the 1920s. Metroland was the commuter catchment area for the line running ...”

“... the American Revolution remain a conundrum. Why did the colonies that had supported Britain in its North American struggle against France between 1754 and 1763 turn so quickly against Britain’s relatively benign parliamentary government? Understandably enough, British attempts after 1763 to make the colonists contribute to the costs of imperial defence ...”

“... was born Guido di Pietro around 1395 in a hamlet in the Mugello, a region thirty kilometres north-east of Florence. By 1417 he was in Florence itself and already working as a dipintore, according to a document recording his admission to one of the city’s lay confraternities. Around 1420, he entered the Dominican Order, soon after taking the name ...”