“... Thomas Grant’s​ Court Number One tells the stories of 11 prominent trials heard in Court One of the Old Bailey between 1907, when it opened, and 2003. His aim is to use these stories as illustrations of ‘British sensibilities and preoccupations over the last hundred years … Through the criminal trials … there can be traced at least one version of the history of social and moral change over the last century ...”

“... of birds in Britain in a single calendar year. I never got anywhere close. There were so many more birds that I hadn’t seen than I had. I often tried to turn common birds into uncommon birds. Those house sparrows that haunted the privet hedge by the road: surely one of them was a tree sparrow? In my head there was also a list of ‘magic’ birds, birds ...”

“... and protected; his greatest ‘labour’ is the burden of carrying his own fool’s bauble. In Thomas Nashe’s comedy Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1592), the fool, Will Summers, trips lightly onstage, half-dressed and unburdened by any of the things regular courtiers have to worry about: ‘without money, without garters, without girdle, without a ...”

“... at difficult times, enjoin himself in his journal to ‘Be Gray.’ In literary history Gray is more often an object of curiosity than of admiration. He is known for having not just one of his poems but his poetic language held up to the light by Wordsworth, as an example of all that was merely poeticised. In a letter to his friend Richard West, Gray ...”

“... of 1835). The desire for one was certainly there. Beating Grimm very slightly to the punch, Thomas Keightley brought out his Fairy Mythology in 1828; Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, which appeared nearly a century later, had a similar aim. Since then, books and articles about the ‘fairy faith’ have continued to appear. But ...”

“... Published two hundred years ago this year, An Essay on the Principle of Population made the Rev. Thomas Robert malthus into the man of the moment. Malthus’s principle – that population inevitably outruns food resources – was heralded by some as the decisive scientific refutation of the mad perfectibilist schemes of the French Revolutionaries and their English confrères like William Godwin, and damned by others as hardheartedness incarnate ...”

“... plain they are, the poem never loses its mesmeric wet grip, its impact of saturation. This is the more interesting since Hughes’s language has often in previous collections given the impression of a weight-lifter hurling steel girders and plastic laths around with an equally ferocious virtuosity. Now, down on the farm, it seems exactly equal to the task ...”

“... Berlin, where he found the sight of ‘yellow-marked benches for the Jews in the Tiergarten . . . more sickening than any newspaper article could have made it’. What Grisewood saw in Berlin, and no doubt reported to Jones, doesn’t appear to have substantially altered his or Jones’s politics. In an anti-war essay dated 11 May 1939 and intended for the ...”

“... you get one.Cuthler’s scandalous grief was recorded in a booklet of about fifty pages, among more than a thousand other parish reports from the diocese of Hereford in 1397. These were the results of an inquiry called a visitation, whereby church authorities attempted to discern the state of religious life in the parishes. Local worthies sent reports to ...”

“... visceral reaction many people have against it, in spite of its being much less destructive than more traditional forms of military violence. Drones, or UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), are more selective in the killing of enemies, produce less collateral damage to non-combatants and impose no physical risk to those who ...”

“... of power. The ways in which reality is tweaked in Enigma (1995), Harris’s second novel, are more modest. As in Fatherland, the Germans have somehow ascertained that the British are able to decipher the codes produced by their Enigma machines. The man recalled to Bletchley Park to enable the British to regain the upper hand in the cryptographic struggle ...”

“... tainted by liberation theology. Gerardi told the local army chief that the soldiers were killing more people than the guerrillas were, and that the military’s lawless actions were recruiting civilians to the guerrillas’ cause. One night in July 1980 the bishop was smuggled out of a village along a mountain path to avoid an army ambush that had been set ...”

“... to a genuine reassessment of Mary’s Church remain. The greatest of these is the burning of more than 280 Protestant men, women and teenagers between February 1555 and November 1558. This was the most intense religious persecution anywhere in 16th-century Europe, and has seemed to most historians conclusive evidence of the Marian regime’s ...”

“... a hasty scribble on a verso may be as significant as the fancy drawing on the recto – possibly more so. In the ‘labyrinthine’ (his word) Soane archive a capacity for taking pains is a sine qua non of worthwhile research and it has resulted in a worthwhile exposition of a small corner of architectural history. Small but significant, not only in respect ...”

“... and divorce. That sort of thing. Then there are the things we think about every day. It’s much more likely that we’re going to come up with TV-movie-of-the-week responses about the big things because we haven’t had practice with them. I write about the little things because we’ve usually come to some interesting conclusions about them, we’ve ...”