“... Schwarz (Fricka) and Heinz Zednik (Loge). Here, and throughout the cycle, the lighting was superb. Brian Large’s direction of the filming was sensitive, and provided a salutary contrast with the horrors of BBC Television’s Kata Kabanova. But although Wagner’s exploration of the corrupting, dehumanising effects of power naturally includes an indictment of ...”

“... before one day Bardens looked out of his fifth-floor office window in Alexandra Palace, on its hill above the North London suburbs, and saw the capital winking and humming to the south. ‘I suddenly thought, “Bugger it,”’ he remembers here, ‘“Panorama, that’s the title.”’ The first edition was a disaster. To make the programme as ...”

“... minute knowledge of East Coast hip hop. We said ‘wack’ and ‘dope’ while quoting Life of Brian, bought baggy trousers so wiggerish and wide that when the wind blew down from the Alps and into Luisenstraße it would catch them like sails, propelling us forwards or dragging us backwards to Irish bars with Republican posters where Liam would get free ...”

“... of international glory’ for the Soviet Union. ‘Moscow briefly shone as a city on the hill, showing the way to a brave new world.’ Zubok, perhaps because his personal memory is longer, is more cautious: in his reading, this grand gesture made Gorbachev an international superstar and moral example – but it applied only to him personally, not ...”

“... Fifth Monarchy Men, Levellers and millenarian preachers which E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill describe in their work. For Thompson, Pilgrim’s Progress is one of the two ‘founding texts of the English working-class movement’ (the other is The Rights of Man). And so to admire Bunyan is by definition to be a dissenting radical, a nonconformist and ...”

“... courageous and manly tyrant’ in Herbert’s view, who would certainly have been played by Brian Blessed had anyone got round to making the TV series. He had individuality like a disease: he was belligerently non-conformist in religion, keeping to a version of Christianity that had been revealed uniquely to him, and he pronounced straightforward ...”

“... when she heard the news but I bundled her into a taxi and told her to hurry. I rang my friend Brian who runs an epidemiological unit mainly concerned with HIV/Aids. It’ll cost you, he said, but if she can get AZT and 3TC in the first 12 hours you can cut the Aids risk by 80 per cent. Brian has twice had to apply such ...”

“... Stella, Noland, Louis, Frankenthaler, Olitski, Poons; his Britons, Caro, Tucker, Latham, Hill, Hockney, Richard Smith, Bernard Cohen, Denny, Hodgkin, Ayres, Buckley, while his one European was Pol Bury. So Kasmin’s choice was focused on abstraction, with Hockney as the joker in the pack, where Fraser’s was wider, though with an emphasis on ...”

“... a name that recurs, along with the philosopher Hyman (Hymie) Levy, Peter Fryer the journalist, and Brian Pearce, well known today as a translator of historical works from French and Russian. Levy she remembers as a very persuasive public speaker, whose Edinburgh accent ‘made everything sound reasonable’. Her observation post at the office did not reveal ...”

“... Fringe. I had a pretty quiet war really. I was one of the Few. We were stationed down at Biggin Hill. One Sunday we got word Jerry was coming in, over Broadstairs, I think it was. We got up there quickly as we could and, you know, everything was very calm and peaceful. England lay like a green carpet below me and the war seemed worlds away. I could see ...”

“... language barriers makes for better mutual understanding. Why would one prefer a world in which hill peoples navigate through a linguistic thicket in which they must operate in five or more languages, as his informants do in the New Guinea Highlands? Here, Diamond, as evolutionary biologist, has two choices. He could claim that the extinction of languages ...”

“... of Brisingamen with ‘The Legend of Alderley’. A hundred and forty knights sleep under the hill, ready to wake when England is in mortal danger, all but one with a milk-white mare sleeping by his side. Then a local farmer taking his fine white mare to market meets a wizard … There’s a pleasing Cheshire usage that Garner uses throughout his ...”

“... met a similar fate. In 1995, Helen wrote to President Clinton; so did Margaret McKinney, whose son Brian had also been ‘disappeared’. Clinton’s intervention ensured that the issue became part of the negotiations that led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. In 1999, the House of Commons set up a Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains which ...”

“... made that ‘there had been a number of similar claims in the media and that the evidence of Dr Brian Jones’ – a senior government scientist – ‘showed that the report that there was concern in intelligence circles was correct.’9 As far as Lord Hutton was concerned, all this was neither here nor there. The ‘communication by the media of ...”

“... minister when in office. John McGregor (afterwards Lord McGregor) has rejoined merchant bankers Hill Samuel since his departure from the Transport Department, where he was Secretary of State. Hill Samuel has advised the Government in many privatisations, including that of British Airways. During Mr McGregor’s tenure at ...”