“... was a very, very dangerous job,’ Albertina says. ‘We used to put a plank down, 70 foot high, then run across [that] plank carrying another plank. No harnesses, we’d just run across. You had to have bottle. A lot of the Scotland Road lads went over and did the job. And there were a lot of Birkenhead lads, who’d come from similar areas. Some ...”

“... In the first vehicle, Blackett saw a flash and sparks at 23.37 hrs, and told the driver to put his foot down and get out of there. Then he realised the second snatch wasn’t following them and went back to help. They radioed headquarters as their snatch rumbled back to the stricken vehicle. The regimental medical officer at Camp Abu Naji, Captain Vickers, was ...”

“... I recognised two of his aides as my UCLA classmates: ramrod-stiff, crew-cut Bob Haldeman and jowly John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s ‘gatekeeper’ and dirty-tricks adviser respectively. Bob, wintry-eyed and controlled, whispered urgently to a Secret Service guy. But it was Ehrlichman’s gaze that held me. Hot, angry, personal. From a sidewalk angle looking ...”

“... and it is already running out. Water limitations were noticed from the beginning, when Major John Wesley Powell and his crew became the first white men to float down the Colorado. Powell’s 1875 Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, an expansion of his magazine reports, is still in print. It is a gorgeous book about ...”

“... to deal with the equally relentless productivity of the Dickens industry? Since his best friend John Forster published The Life of Charles Dickens (1871-76), the vagaries of Dickens’s life and the brilliance of his writing have led to countless attempts to interpret, diagnose or explain the man through the writing, or the writing through the man. Certain ...”

“... from Enoch Powell, who was by then, scarier still, an Ulster Unionist, to Tony Benn and Michael Foot. With a sly coyness that sits oddly with her later reputation, the newly elected leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, operated, like Wilson, on the sidelines of the Yes campaign. The result, in a notionally divided country, was a resounding ...”

“... earlier this year that he was finally getting the hang of it seven years in, just when he has one foot out of the door. For democratic leaders this is the tragedy of power: they only learn how to do their jobs once the public is sick of the sight of them, or the constitution is telling them they have reached their limit. But it’s an illusion: it just seems ...”

“... his intellectual commitment to incarnation, he was liable also to question material reality. John Heath-Stubbs quotes him as saying that ‘the most difficult thing in the world … is to realise that other people exist.’ He was capable of writing both an ode in praise of shitting and a poem in which such everyday acts as washing oneself become infused ...”

“... she gave throbbing lectures in spangled satin and Egyptian beads, and was painted by Augustus John in silks that don’t look too dusty. David Piper called it ‘the only existing humane portrait of a Lady Don’ and Harrison was pleased, thinking she looked ‘like a distinguished prize-fighter who has had a vision and collapsed under it’. Wade’s ...”

“... out that in fact he went back to England for a few years, where his time at Oxford overlapped with John Ruskin’s tenure as Slade Professor of Fine Art. Rhodes wasn’t there to hear Ruskin give his inaugural lecture – the one about England’s duty to ‘found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest ...”

“... and arrived at Oxford in 1853 a fervent Tractarian: he dreamed of following in the footsteps of John Henry Newman or even joining a monastic brotherhood. The spiritual intensity of his Oxford phase and the dream of brotherhood never left him, but the appeal of the church gradually faded; by the time he set out for London three years later, the disciple of ...”

“... is dominated by the stupendous last-minute addition to Nijs’s acquisitions – the nine nine-foot-wide canvases that make up Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar and which are normally housed at Hampton Court Palace. Leaving Mantua, the curators argue, saved them from the Landsknechts who ransacked the Gonzaga palace in an episode of the Thirty ...”

“... but the most interestingly historical of them, Y Gododdín, does so only tangentially. Whatever John Morris and Leslie Alcock may have written in the 1970s and 1980s, the evidence provides ‘no space … for an “Age of Arthur” during which a victorious British emperor-like figure held back the barbarian hordes’. That image really dates back to the ...”

“... on a moral ladder. Being ‘heathen’ and not Christian kept most strangers near the ladder’s foot. But the English added another rung: mockery. Wearing grass skirts, worshipping monkeys, eating missionaries, chanting woo-woo ‘animal noises’ or merely being Black? Hilarious! The returning traveller could always raise hearty laughs. Lewis, too, can ...”

“... Strong’s own account and the version given by his predecessor, the terrifying and not-much-loved John Pope-Hennessy, in his autobiography, Learning to Look. Both directors describe in some detail the office arrangement at the start of Strong’s appointment in 1974. Strong himself bemoans the primitiveness of it all: not just ‘no direct telephone to the ...”