“... a mile. Sometimes they would be encouraged to race down a long street, rather than over a grassy field, and the relative nimbleness of the birds became the subject of fast and furious debating, and of course betting. The long distances that pigeons would later be expected to cover – capitalising on their strange homing instinct – did not figure in the ...”

“... Just​ before the EU referendum in 2016, the American political scientist Andrew Moravcsik wrote in the Financial Times that Brexit should be seen as a kabuki drama – ‘stylised but meaningless posturing’. Four years on, it is clear that nothing could be further from the truth. Even if the UK does manage to strike a deal with the EU, relations between the two have been fundamentally altered ...”

“... was elected, he spoke at a mental health trust fun day in his constituency instead of going on the Andrew Marr Show. Later that day he was filmed as he hurried along the pavement outside Westminster in silence, refusing to answer reporters’ questions: it ‘looked like a perp walk’, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian. ‘He isn’t playing the ...”

“... and start working the paste into the stubborn spots.’ The filmmaker Mike Leigh would have a field day. While occasionally bashing us over the head with his compassion, he is at the same time very British and very cruel, quite likeably describing us being dislikeable, or being vulnerable and in pain. There’s a scene in his movie Secrets and Lies where ...”

“... Greenwich, the exit for the Dome, is even bigger than Canary Wharf and also boasts a football-field concourse over the platforms, perforated by fat, V-shaped columns. Everything below ground is a deep blue, with an inconsequential sprinkle of scarlet: a decorative, rather English idea on the part of its architect, Will Alsop. Canada Water is one of three ...”

“... way developmental pathways have been tweaked to generate biological novelty is so strong that the field now has its own (ghastly) name: ‘evo-devo’. The appearance in English of Hervé Le Guyader’s study is timely. But the book, whose primary purpose is to republish several of Geoffroy’s most important works, is only for real aficionados. Those ...”

“... to Gordon Burn’s horribly fascinating books about Peter Sutcliffe and Fred and Rosemary West. Andrew Hankinson’s new book dramatises the last days of Raoul Moat, the Newcastle bouncer and bodybuilder who in July 2010 shot his former partner, Samantha Stobbart, her new boyfriend, Chris Brown, and a traffic policeman, David Rathband, setting in motion a ...”

“... In 1937 a small gas field was discovered near Whitby in Yorkshire. In 1943 in Nazi-occupied Holland drilling began in a search for gas which met success only in July 1959 when the Groningen field was discovered in Friesland. It became clear that Groningen, the world’s second largest gas field, stretched far out into the North Sea and geologists noticed that the strata in which the Dutch deposits were found were actually an undersea extension of a formation which began in Yorkshire ...”

“... good humour throughout’. It was no better in Sligo, or in Carlow, where the unhappy choice of Andrew J. Kettle as the Parnellite candidate provoked so vigorous a tattoo on the appropriate utensil at Parnell’s meetings as to turn his last campaign into a hideous skimmington. They hunted Mr Fox to a kill. His sudden death in October 1891, at the age of ...”

“... suspect culture of science was a more obvious target for the sour provincialism of F.R. Leavis. Andrew Brown’s J.D. Bernal: The Sage of Science is better at satisfying biographical than historical curiosity. It is not the first book based on the Bernal Archive, now in the Cambridge University Library, but it gives us more of the facts than all its ...”

“... example of what came of them. A row of young women, skirts hitched up, stand knee-deep in a paddy field. Clothes, skin, the leaves of rice, water and sky, are done in tiny strokes so glossy that the paint glitters – you might think specks of glass had been added to it. Luminosity is indeed achieved, but the price, here and elsewhere, is paid in terms of ...”

“... of work were a new existential value. David Storey may have been, even in a heavily contested field, the most inhibited British writer of his generation. He was born in 1933 and grew up in Wakefield, in a family that felt work was destiny and everything else was showing off. His father worked in a coal mine but Storey, while being paid to play rugby ...”

“... it may be the end of him. In Jackson’s case, the tabloid mentality has had a field day, thanks to his weirdness, his nose-jobs and his Neverland Ranch. Wacko Jacko was found guilty of his appearance, his little voice, his white skin, his make-up, his friendship with the young film star Macaulay Culkin: he was guilty before he was charged ...”

“... scholars some distance from the day to day concerns of those who actually toil in the literary field. And ‘genre’ – a staple of literary analysis in other historical periods – presents a special problem for modernism, which so often took pride in exploding or eluding it. Magazines, then, make for a nice object of study: still recognisable to both ...”

“... the poem from its own world.In this short book produced for the ‘Contemporary Writers’ series Andrew Motion has written the best biographical and critical study of Larkin so far. He understands his subject as a poet, as an admirer and to some extent a follower, who has also taken part in studies of the Movement group of poets ...”