“... centrality in British culture. Characteristically feeble echoes of this assault were evident in John Major’s recent sneering at ‘progressive theorists’, but some years ago the real emotional dynamic was laid bare, indecently bare, by (as usual) Norman Tebbit, who extolled ‘the man in the pub’ against the upper-class ‘cocktail set’ on the ...”

“... John Betjeman was the voice of postwar Englishness: at best, humorous, quirky and enthusiastic about some of the oddest things; at worst, parochial and smug shading into bitter. How ironic, in view of later developments and the argument of Timothy Mowl’s book, that Nikolaus Pevsner’s first visit to England, in 1930, was to research a new topic: Englishness in art ...”

“... The Synges were landlord-class, with the mentality that went with such privilege. As a young man, John thought himself some kind of radical in a vaguely European sense. In Ireland, he knew that the real issue was the ownership of land. In 1893 he canvassed against Gladstone’s second Home Rule Bill on the grounds that it would exacerbate the question of land ...”

“... every ten years. Her book falls into three main periods, beginning with the German immigrant John Jacob Astor (1763-1848) who founded the family fortunes in the fur trade. Those engaged in it were prepared to suffer appalling physical hardship in the frozen North and to ruin the Indians and one another as opportunity ...”

“... another high-toned writer, I started journalistic life on the Express, initially the Sunday in John Junor’s long days, then the Daily under Roy Wright. Beaverbrook had been dead by then for ten years. The amiable son, who touchingly refused the title in a spirit of unaffected and perhaps warranted humility, reigned rather than ruled in his place and was ...”

“... On 16 October 1859, a white anti-slavery agitator called John Brown led 21 followers in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. A previous expedition against a Kansas slave-owning settlement had ended in five deaths, but Brown had far grander hopes for his new enterprise – to start an insurrection across the South ...”

“... his rucksack, all his travellers cheques, than admit such diminution. Ranging between London and North Africa, Israel and somewhere (close to Jamestown?) called Merriland, his new book is pitched at street-level. It asks to be called vivid, and often is – though, profligate of detail, Boyle can overplay the enchantment of objects: Volvos imported by ...”

“... possible. Shockley worked out first the theory of semiconduction, and then set his colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain to work on a practical device to manipulate electrical current on a semiconductor. On 23 December 1947 they demonstrated the first working transistor. That invention won the three men the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956.Shockley ...”

“... force for Heaney at that time because of his own recent experience. His most controversial book, North, had appeared the previous summer. Several of its most striking poems grew from a fascination with the Iron Age bodies that had been exhumed from the peat bogs of Northern Europe: the subject became, as he later recollected, ‘a completely instinctive ...”

“... as one soon learns from the letters he wrote to his son Pierre in the 1930s and 1940s (quoted in John Russell’s Matisse: Father and Son) – even the old Matisse was far from the calm, masterful presence one might have imagined, anxious as he was as a father and misunderstood, so he thought, as a husband. For the evidence of his art and his life to add ...”

“... in a country whose media are perennially obsessed with a caricatured contrast between a rough North and a soft South. (Manchester likes to talk tough, but is in many ways a more bourgeois city than Birmingham.) Birmingham became prominent because of its industrial power, but its history is very different from that of the ‘industrial ...”

“... appear as many multi­colour­ed shorelines woven into an undul­ating whole. A key floats in the North Sea (mark­ed here as ‘The German Ocean’), east of the Humber, displaying a cross-section of strata. Smith’s Strata Identified by Organised Fossils (1816) introduced his principle of faunal succession, which posits that the fossil types present in ...”

“... carving of Cromwell on horseback, wearing laurels and ‘trampling six nations under foot’, as John Evelyn put it – remained in place. Pepys, who sat on the Navy Board, knew how expensive a replacement would be and hoped that its significance would fade with the memory of the war. In December 1663, however, ‘after it was forgot whose it was, or any ...”

“... of military occupation. In Fire on the Mountain Terry Bissell posits a world in which a successful John Brown’s raid sets off a black revolution in the American South which leads to the formation of a socialist state, ultra-modern and prosperous, in contrast with the shabby private-enterprise North that limps along on the ...”

“... who was just a year old. She may, or may not, have had six other children who died in infancy. John Chapple is punctilious about what he calls ‘the knotty entrails of oaken facts’, and will not pretend to know what he cannot prove. The pathos of Mrs Stevenson’s faded existence is not lost on him, and he does what he can for her ...”