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“... had been got up to look like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. Dead or alive. ‘Vote Michael Moorcock’, it said. ‘King of the City’. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing narratives (confessing, denouncing, celebrating, plea-bargaining for its own sanity), was being punted by its publicists as ‘the ...”

“... what the firm itself sold for on the open market. On the face of it, the valuation is astounding. Michael Bott, currently in charge of ” the Reading collection, said that he first thought a decimal point had gone missing. And if the Murray archive is worth those many millions, how much is the (firmly closed) Aladdin’s cave, the Faber ...”

“... NCCL was a barometric indication of the state of civil rights and the rule of law when Margaret Roberts was still a child. Yet it has taken the illiberal and unconstitutional conduct of her three governments to push a written constitution and a Bill of Rights to the head of the political agenda. The radical authoritarianism of the Eighties has finally ...”

“... without local authorities and we want to avoid that by all means in this country,’ Alderman Roberts of Grantham was moved to remark in 1946. As John Davis concluded in the Cambridge Urban History of Britain (2000), the second half of the 20th century saw local authorities reduced to ‘agents of the central welfare state, their incapacity off-set by ...”

“... and explaining the natural world, and religion to studying human purposes, meanings and values. Michael Ruse’s book is an astonishing contribution to this literature. It astonishes because of the bravado of its thesis. Instead of espousing Gould’s tame view that religion and science are distinct but complementary, Ruse, a philosopher and historian of ...”

“... in which Minton was far from being the only considerable talent drinking itself to death. The ‘Roberts’ (Colquhoun and MacBryde) were there beside him; Dylan Thomas was boozing in the same pubs. Art is not made in that spirit any more. The notion that all things are a gamble, that candles should be burnt at both ends, that poverty is often art’s ...”

“... jets on Monday …’, with the underlined words linking to an article by Sarah El Deeb and Maggie Michael for Associated Press published at 9 p.m. on 21 February. This article provided no corroboration of Cole’s claim that Gaddafi’s fighter jets (or any other aircraft) had strafed or bombed anyone in Tripoli or anywhere else. The same is true of every ...”

“... to humanise it. His great find is a previously unseen cache of letters from the young Margaret Roberts to her older sister, Muriel, written variously from Grantham, Oxford and Dartford. There, she talks about boyfriends, fashion, shopping and the various inconveniences of life in wartime and then austerity Britain. They are, I suppose, human. But boy are ...”

“... are announced, the subject of sour and unfair disparagement – in this case, by a Dr Ffrangcon Roberts, who in turn was sharply rebuked by Sir Henry Dale OM, FRS. Some very great advances in medicine have been brought about by clinical reasoning alone, without recourse to experimentation on animals – vaccination against smallpox was one such discovery ...”

“... World War on Britain is likewise appraised by Ferguson, this time in collaboration with Andrew Roberts, posing the question: what if Hitler had invaded in 1940? With national survival depending on so narrow a margin, this is a contingency which the authors consider better worthy of contemplation as a real historical possibility than the issue of a ...”

“... with Rebecca West. More recently, there have been full-length treatments of different kinds by Michael Sherborne (2010) and Adam Roberts (2019), plus David Lodge’s fictionalised rendering of Wells’s life in A Man of Parts (2011), while four fully annotated volumes of his letters came out in 1998. Claire Tomalin is ...”

“... of social class, even if democratic historians would like to think so. How does all this affect Michael Roberts’s notorious ‘military revolution’? Hall’s answer once again is to give Early Modern generals credit for having some sense. If, by about 1600, ‘the art of war was stiffening into immobility’, as ...”

“... is seven billion. Two and a half billion adults don’t have a bank account. Paul Vigna and Michael Casey’s excellent book Cryptocurrency explains what that means:3 Somewhere in the order of five billion people belong to the households that are cut off from a financial system that the rest of us take for granted. They can’t start savings ...”

“... language. The colours were too bright perhaps.7 March. Read and enjoy Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts about the lure of in-between places and the edges of cities and other communities. I feel I was on to this years ago in my play The Old Country, when Hilary, a spy in the Foreign Office, describes the ...”

“... are Brigade officers. John Springhall and Brian Fraser have collaborated on the British chapters; Michael Hoare has written the chapters on the movement overseas. The Brigade has shown an admirable willingness – by no means common among voluntary bodies – to give its historians free access to its archives, and to leave them to draw their own ...”