“... the category we have come to know, and take for granted, as ‘public opinion’. In the 1970s, Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man made Habermas’s argument more concrete and detailed: late 17th and 18th-century coffee houses ‘naturally were places where speech flourished’. When a man went into one, he paid an entrance fee of a penny, was told ...”

“... compiled the largest herbal of the 16th century. John Parkinson, who was appointed apothecary to King James, acquired the title of Botanicus Regius Primarius after the publication of his massive folio on the nature and properties of plants, Paradisi in Sole (1629). Both men provided themselves with coats of arms and salaries to match. Neither was quite as ...”

“... it’s fuzzy, sometimes it’s a matter of perspective. Does my daughter believe that the king is the head of state? Well, does that require her to distinguish the state from the government? Or that she understand how the United Kingdom differs from Great Britain? Determining what someone believes is often more like determining whether Hamlet is an ...”

“... seeking support for the Civil Rights movement in the South and in particular for Martin Luther King. The text deplored what the Police and other elements of the then dominant white segregationist forces in the South had done to peaceful protesters against racial discrimination. It said that Dr King had been arrested ...”

“... set within a shopping mall, Grand Central, which blurs into another shopping mall, the Bull Ring. Richard Vinen, writing the first serious history of Birmingham in a long while, is aware of how hard it is to pin the city down, to explain what it is or what it is for. Planners in the 1960s, he says, ‘were sometimes perplexed as to why Birmingham had been ...”

“... dense with social detail, and doesn’t represent a comfortable ‘mystification’ any more than King Lear does. What other English novelist evokes the world of work and community within a palpable landscape as Hardy does? Or is less patronising to working people like Gabriel Oak or Tess or even Diggory Venn? Snell’s isn’t the whole story, even if ...”

“... In the evenings, after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the ...”

“... knitted yellow stockings, he was always quick-witted, a story-teller, an enchanter. Introducing King George VI to the Snowdon skyline, he pointed to the peak of Cnicht, remarking, ‘That bit there, Your Majesty, is my own’; then, recalling his prior duty to the idea of a Snowdonia National Park, quickly added: ‘but keep it under your Crown.’ Jonah ...”

“... Rain, Steam and Speed’ (1844) J.M.W. Turner’s​  Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway hangs in a corner of Room 34 at the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square. The painting remains close to where it was first exhibited in 1844 when the Royal Academy occupied the gallery’s east wing. ‘There comes a train down upon you,’ Thackeray wrote after seeing the painting ...”

“... producer, and he later brought in Norman Mailer to write the book. He showed himself to be the king deal-maker and media broker, the chief documenter, of grand-scale American tragedy. Wherever there has been sensational news in America over the last thirty years, there you will invariably find Lawrence Schiller. Schiller has helped all manner of American ...”

“... are fetched by Gershom, Washington’s Jewish-African slave. ‘Gershom is presently telling King-Joaks – “Actually, they’re Slave-and-Master Joaks, re-tailored for these Audiences. King says to his Fool ...” ’I started looking in my wonderful Brewer’s Dictionary. I discovered, among many other things, that ...”

“... all be going to hell. That’ll answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took ...”

“... It employed no reporters – news items were prepared from Reuter’s agency copy – until Richard Dimbleby, a reporter on Southampton’s evening newspaper, applied for a job with a bold letter suggesting that some members of the news staff might be called ‘BBC reporters or BBC correspondents’ and ‘held in readiness, just as are the evening ...”

“... view of the period, which takes the idea of an English Renaissance to be elitist and aestheticist. Richard Halpern​ knows that European tragedy has often followed the Greeks. His Eclipse of Action starts with an account of the Oresteia and ends with Sarah Kane’s Blasted, a viscerally shocking play which reworks atrocities from tragic tradition. As turning ...”

“... to build careers on the blacklist. The virus that would surface decades later, disguised as Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, began here. Fault lines in the American psyche are most obvious at the interface of showbiz saccharine and the political process: Monroe’s birthday tribute to JFK, Sinatra as MC at the Kennedy White House, late-liberal ...”