“... how much rainfall across the country varied from year to year, because nobody was keeping count. George James Symons, one of those energetic Victorians who combined the erudition of a scholar with the organisational abilities of a manager and the enthusiasm of an amateur collector, realised what was needed and put it in place: a countrywide network of ...”

“... and cheers will have rung round the Armed Forces when the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, had the courage to say this publicly to his Secretary of State. The latest forecast is that, after the departure from Iraq of the 27,000 troops committed to whatever fighting takes place, 15,000 will be required to secure and police the ...”

“... become, even from his own point of view. The state of public opinion has been well summarised by Michael Quinlan, a former Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Defence, writing in the Tablet (1 February): It has become more and more widely recognised, in much of United States opinion as well as almost overwhelmingly elsewhere, that a ...”

“... A short paragraph on page 234, for instance, consists of a snippet each from ‘the philosopher Michael Polanyi’, ‘the literary theorist M.M. Bahktin’, ‘the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’. In some cases it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that either Sennett or his research assistants have fudged their homework: surely if Sennett had read the ...”

“... Robertson embarked on this project as a result of an evening in 1999 when the Australian judge Sir Michael Kirby delivered a lecture in the hall of Gray’s Inn to mark the 350th anniversary of Charles’s execution. Kirby, one of the common law’s great jurists, was not unsympathetic to the plight of the king. It was in the course of preparing a paper which ...”

“... in 15th-century England. Her role, largely forgotten for centuries and thrillingly rediscovered by Michael Jones and Malcolm Underwood in The King’s Mother (1992), might usefully have played a greater part in Kevin Sharpe’s admittedly already massive study of Tudor spin-doctoring. Sharpe’s subject is the considerable range of devices which the Tudor ...”

“... does what might by some be described as a ‘splendid job’ on Bobby Fischer, and a genial one on George Steiner’s book about the great Reykjavik encounter: ‘There’s not one detailed comparison,’ he writes admiringly, ‘between a middle game and Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge. Page after page goes by without any reference to Auschwitz.’ All the fine ...”

“... on which he’d been elected, and to find a way of blaming it on others. It was decided to send Michael Armacost, an old China hand in both Democratic and Republican Administrations, to conduct the final obsequies. Armacost, indeed, refused to take on the mission ‘unless there was a consensus that the human rights linkage was going to be jettisoned. He ...”

“... not, as some still think, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. The Rival Poet of Sonnet 86 remains George Chapman, not, as some think, Samuel Daniel or Michael Drayton or Christopher Marlowe or Ben Jonson or, since his was assuredly an ‘alien pen’ (Sonnet 78), Torquato Tasso. Candidates for the doubtful honour of being ...”

“... the two of them discuss the books he has been reading as they go. Writers under discussion include Michael Bracewell, Dick Hebdige, Lynne Tillman, Kathy Acker, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Johnson, W.G. Sebald. The eateries and supermarkets of Aberdeen are visited, and rendered, as far as I can see, entirely accurately. (I come from Aberdeen, which is how I’d ...”

“... transformation of Irish society by introducing Catholic emancipation at the same time, which George III frustrated because he found it inconsistent with his coronation oath. Indeed, Walker and Greer note that the Protestant Orange Order, established in 1795, opposed legislative union in 1800 precisely because its members thought it would immediately lead ...”

“... original molecules. Some preservation methods are more effective still. In 1982, the entomologist George Poinar and electron microscopist Roberta Hess published a paper on a 40-million-year-old fossil fly stuck in a glob of amber. Exquisite images taken with Hess’s instruments reveal individual cells in the fly’s abdomen, frozen in death, a microscopic ...”

“... status as citizens, could not be held to have violated their allegiance by rebellion.In 1781 Lord George Gordon stood trial in London for treason, having provoked anti-Catholic riots in the course of which the townhouse of the presiding judge, Lord Mansfield, had been burned down (a personal interest that appears not to have troubled him at all). Mansfield ...”

“... The Dadaists would be a good guess, but the truly political ones, such as John Heartfield and George Grosz, were communists, and since the early days of Proudhon and Marx anarchists and communists have been more rivals than comrades. The ultra-composed Neo-Impressionists aren’t obvious angels of chaos, yet Georges Seurat, Camille Pissarro, Paul Signac ...”

“... A considerable amount of research has been carried out into the practice in recent years. Michael Ebner’s Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy (2010) used hundreds of archival files to piece together the experience of everyday Italians under the dictatorship and showed that torture and beatings were common in confino, food scarce and of poor ...”