“... off. So Shaw had to deal with a mutinous directorate as well as with a difficult chairman, Sir William Rees-Mogg, and a series of unsympathetic ministers. He has lost no time in his retirement in giving an account of what went on. Apart from the business of deciding what is culturally valuable and what isn’t, the Council’s main concern is of course ...”

“... by Dan Jacobson and Robert Alter – on Biblical narrative, Robertson Davies’s The Rebel Angels, William Golding’s The Paper Men, Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot, and John Updike’s Hugging the Shore. There are also essays on Ring Lardner, on D.H. Lawrence, and on Structuralism, which Lodge as late as 1980 regarded as ‘the most significant ...”

“... this is a matter of ‘inflation of honours’. Some of it is local yeomen families growing rich: William Ayloffe and Thomas Leggatt, protagonists in the bitterest local feud, both came into this category and both brandished family pews in the face of the parish. Yet, though these families represent economic change within Havering, more represent economic ...”

“... Henry Clutton, who had originally been appointed and had done the Chapter House (assisted by William Burges, experimenting with colours), rendered himself ineligible by converting to Catholicism.Had Clutton continued, the cathedral would be a building rather different from the one we see today. He wasn’t a man to hide his Francophile ...”

“... is less Ishmael than Ahab by the time he limps off across the ice in pursuit of a white bear); Conrad (there’s something of Lord Jim about Sumner, trying to redeem his shameful past, and more than a little of Kurtz in Drax); Elizabeth Gaskell’s only historical novel, Sylvia’s Lovers, set in a whaling community based on Whitby during the ...”

“... friends climbed over the walls of the inaccessible estate to be photographed, all of them wearing white masks, beside it. Woodward does not include the Broken Column – perhaps because it took a posse of Surrealists to grasp its weirdness. Ruins pull our responses in two directions. They offer concrete evidence, of the architectural orders of classical ...”

“... anxieties of growers and the anger of workers would become irrelevant. In 1897, forty years after William Perkin stumbled on the first synthetic aniline dye – mauve – researchers at BASF finally synthesised indigo. The work had taken years and cost eighteen million gold marks – more than the capital value of the company. Experiments in organic chemistry ...”

“... Their greatest challenge was sea-ice, which has almost always filled the straits, even in summer. William Parry spent the summers of 1821 and 1822 waiting for the ice to clear from Fury and Hecla Strait. But though the strait is named after his ships, he never made it through. Leopold McClintock, despatched by Lady Franklin to search for her husband on King ...”

“... were quick to report that the only big button on Trump’s desk is the one that can summon a White House steward with a Coca-Cola. Still, the story Plotnick has to tell isn’t just about the concentration of power. From the outset, capitalism sought to develop digital command as a ‘broader practice’: to sell it as a commodity. In 1900, an editorial ...”

“... Tupelo. His older twin, Jesse Garon, was stillborn. (There was ugly gossip later that the doctor, William Robert Hunt, might have had a drink; that he might have saved Jesse if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with the surprise appearance of a second child. But the Presleys were satisfied with his work and Dr Hunt received his standard $15 payment from the ...”

“... Police raided a house in Lees Holm, a mixed area between mostly Asian Savile Town and mostly white Thornhill Edge. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the 7 July bombers, had lived there only for a few months, but his wife, Hasina, and his mother-in-law, Farida Patel, were local: ‘99 per cent of the community had never heard of Khan,’ a Savile Town ...”

“... is for professional posers and the in-house magazine-stand offers antique cigarettes and copies of William Burroughs’s Ghosts of Chance. Upstairs, there are quilted blackboard panels behind each bed and the colour television is hidden inside a thin cupboard with a cut-out Osiris eye. Light is hosed from a surgical tube and is so feeble that it’s almost ...”

“... sky, mean freedom. Emotionally, ‘Rocky Acres’ anticipates the attitude familiar from ‘The White Goddess’, who is also to be found on top of a mountain, ‘at the volcano’s head,/Among pack ice’, where         we are gifted, even in November Rawest of seasons, with so huge a sense Of her nakedly worn magnificence We forget cruelty and ...”

“... Eleanor Roosevelt found her ‘hard as steel’, and she wasn’t wrong: asked at a White House dinner in 1942 how strikers were dealt with in China, Meiling drew a fingernail across her throat. Her superior attitude flowed naturally from her birth in 1898 into the influential Soong family of Shanghai. Her eldest sister, Ailing, married the ...”

“... It is ‘better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer’ according to William Blackstone’s famous ratio. For the US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the 4 per cent of convicts exonerated after execution are significant enough to justify sparing the other 96 per cent. It was Benjamin Franklin who said it was folly to trade ...”