“... the Leader of the House) had forgotten that three by-elections were due to take place on the day of the Ely statement. Wilson ‘wondered how it was possible that one should ruin the chances of people voting Labour by having this terrible story blurted out on the six o’clock news’. Crossman began his speech to Parliament with a ‘great frog’ in ...”

“... to disrupt the process, even stop up the hole with chewing gum but resist it. Another sunny warm day but with a strong wind that ruffles the lavender (and makes landing for the hornets tricky). 1 August. A propos Jeffrey Archer. I am rereading the Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters and come across this remark by George Lyttelton: ‘Sprinters always try to beat ...”

“... invented the ‘tradition’ of the ‘Last Night of the Proms’; and from 1968 until the present day, when a succession of BBC controllers of music have tried – with varying degrees of determination and success – to rein in, modify and reinvigorate what they have increasingly come to regard as an embarrassing anachronism. When the manager Robert Newman ...”

“... had fallen out when Neil jumped ship from Marshall’s right-wing TV channel, GB News). The next day, Marshall visited the Spectator offices – just a few doors down from the offices of UnHerd, an online publication he also owns – and held a meeting with the magazine’s staff, at which he complained that the UK’s broadcast media had a left-wing ...”

“... the pilot in the Montgolfier brothers’ balloon in 1783. Nature needed no exaggeration either. As Douglas Adams once said, ‘isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?’ That was in 1979 – but it was possible to think the same thing in 1579.There were many areas of ...”

“... lack of evidence, so they have to improvise. ‘Silence can be a great surprise,’ they write. ‘Day after day of silence. No ordinary city sounds in Steep, but also no thump-thump-thump of anti-aircraft guns. No clattering crash of a nearby explosion. No wailing chorus of sirens, no choking clouds of dust, no corpses ...”

“... the unlikeliest end any empire ever had – went off without a visible hitch. Almost every day of his five-year term, Patten did battle, as he saw it, on Hong Kong’s behalf. Towards the end he was all but alone, shunned by those he had, as he saw it, tried to protect, on the issue he thought most important: democracy. When he arrived, Hong Kong had a ...”

“... the Invisible Man and the woman serving took no notice, just saying: ‘Well, it’s a bit better day.’ I ask him how he got rid of it and he says it went soon after he met Terry, his wife, so that he attributed it to the stresses of being young (and, I imagine, with eczema, unloved) and living in a bedsit with all the hardships of his young life. While he ...”

“... at the yard,With a running fire of stock-whips and a fiery run of hoofs:Oh! The hardest day was never then too hard!Throughout Hornung’s fiction, Australia recurs as the land of freedom where a man can make what he likes of himself. Raffles is a development of his first dark hero, Stingaree, the bushranger who sports a monocle and who robs banks ...”

“... that uniformed police officers would enter the house in significant numbers at all times of the day and night. No visitor would come near their homes because to enter required first to be vetted by the Home Office. Children could do no schoolwork that involved the internet, the use of which was forbidden. Families had endlessly to involve lawyers in the ...”

“... and bribing Donald Trump for years, on the assumption that he would become president some day and serve the Kremlin’s interests. In this fantastic tale, Putin becomes a preternaturally prescient schemer. Like other accusations of collusion, this one has become vaguer over time, adding to the murky atmosphere without ever providing any evidence. The ...”

“... car, Cash was a hybrid, made up of many parts: he appeared in films (A Gunfight, 1970, with Kirk Douglas); he played in prisons (first performing inside in 1957); he campaigned on behalf of Native Americans, and against the Ku Klux Klan; he opposed the Vietnam War; and in 1973 he released an album, Gospel Road, the soundtrack to a self-financed film based on ...”

“... 20th-century non-linear-dynamical point of view. It’s a funny book, Time Bandits crossed with Douglas Adams. It’s an enormous, systematic study of order and disorder, which moves to the strange, slow rhythms of what historians call the longue durée. Although the bulk of its action seems to happen in North America, it is also about 18th-century ...”

“... cleansing (‘transfer’) of the Palestinians across the Jordan; and in 1996 Richard Perle and Douglas Feith (now a senior official at the Pentagon) advised Binyamin Netanyahu to abandon the Oslo Peace Process and return to military repression of the Palestinians. It’s far more probable, therefore, that most members of the Bush and Sharon Administrations ...”

“... it is rare for a provincial disaster to create a national emergency. And on that particular day, the country’s attention was fixed on the polling booths, where a referendum was being held to support or reject the new Constitution. Everyone knew there would be a majority for the ‘yes’ campaign, which was led by the popular and charismatic Hugo ...”