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“... of the inauguration of an academic programme in October 1895, in two rented rooms in what is now John Adam Street. Nor is it unprecedented for someone who has run the School to write about it. One can point to the austere history of the LSE’s foundation by Sir Sydney Caine, or to what Dahrendorf calls ‘William Beveridge’s intriguing London School of ...”

“... of Western Orientalism and of Eastern Occidentalism, both of which Tagore confounded. Edward John Thompson (1886-1946) was then an educational missionary at the Wesleyan College at Bankura. He had published several volumes of verse, and was approaching proficiency in Bengali. After a brief meeting in Calcutta, Tagore invited him to visit him at his ...”

“... to escape, and another is waiting for you, wings outstretched, at the Lenin Hills.’ The meeting hall of the Czech National Memorial in Prague ‘is one of the most memorable, and terrifying, spaces created by Stalinism anywhere in Europe’, with ‘its cyclopean scale and use of so much red marble that you’re practically irradiated as you walk ...”

“... case would never have had the nerve to speak to him. I’d first heard his voice in Exeter College hall some time in 1955. The lower end of the scholars’ table where I was sitting was only a yard or two from high table where the dons dined and, hearing those harsh, quacking tones without knowing whose they were, I said to my neighbour that it sounded like ...”

“... tide has suddenly turned. The tirade against Brussels from Mrs Thatcher’s former adviser, Sir John Hoskyns, was not well received by the Institute of Directors he was still serving. Opinion polls show and the results of the Euro-elections confirm that outright hostility to the Community is no longer an obvious winner. Mrs Thatcher is suffering both from ...”

“... scorn. Thus, when the headless chicken stuff was going on, or when the Tories wrapped the Albert Hall in a blue ribbon, it was hard not to hope that our disdainful visitor was spending the day somewhere else. But where? On every side, there seems to be some Toytown farce in progress. What, for instance, would Gore make of Christine Hamilton? What would he ...”

“... the BBC broadcast dance music on Sunday. That, of course, would not have been possible under John Reith, who had retired in 1938. November 1941 brought the first transmission of Sincerely Yours – Vera Lynn, billed as a ‘sentimental presentation by Howard Thomas’. These dates represent significant stages in the defeat of the old BBC. Vera Lynn, the ...”

“... invariably demeaned by its occupant. Sixty years ago this month, the then Tory Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, chose to announce a new Public Order Bill in the course of an offensive and thoroughly partisan speech at Cleckheaton Town Hall which just happened to be delivered in the same week in which Labour’s annual ...”

“... the programmed reflex of hissing and snarling which would arise from the prescribed corners of the hall. He tells briefly here of his own background in Gravesend, the disabled father, the loving and loved mother, the evacuation to Canada during the war, the admiration for Gravesend’s original and idealistic MP Richard Acland, the bottomless contempt for his ...”

“... of Amaral’s colourised photographs, this time of Lewis Powell, one of the men who conspired with John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Lincoln, and who on the same night made a savage attempt on the life of his secretary of state, William H. Seward. The shoppers were asked when they thought it had been taken. Powell is leaning against the pocked metal of his cell ...”

“... on a Monday afternoon, I spent a while looking into a hole. This is the cavernous future ticketing hall of what will become the new Crossrail station. It runs from Tottenham Court Road up to the old Spanish Bar in Hanway Street and is about the size of a football field. What I mainly saw were white and orange-hatted men lifting insulation blocks with the help ...”

“... to be assigned to the right bodies, but not necessarily, it transpired, at the right angle. Saint John, who had become known as the Melancholy Saint because of his downcast gaze, has emerged from the Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France looking more cheerful now his face points the right way, and he and the others have been thoroughly ...”

“... Paul’s Letters to His Kinsfolk, was a bestseller. Another antiquary who was at Hougoumont, John Gage (1786-1842), left an account that is more personal and more chilling than Scott’s, in a journal kept during a visit that was, for him too, a first taste of foreign travel. Gage was 29 in the summer of 1815. From an old-established family of Suffolk ...”

“... becoming an annual tradition. We went through Slough, and one slogan we chanted was a riposte to John Betjeman’s poem, with its call for ‘friendly bombs’ to fall on the town: ‘Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Slough – THINK NOW!’In the summer Charlotte worked in London as a volunteer for the Africa Bureau, an anti-colonial think tank and part of the ...”

“... have kept all right so far this winter, but won’t brag.’ Three days later, in a note thanking John Middleton Murry for a presentation copy of one of his books, comes a sudden flash of intimacy almost painful in its nakedness: ‘I feel a sad sense of shortcoming at your good opinion of my writings & myself. I fear you do not know what a feeble person I ...”