“... friends, his only link with the world of people who care for him.Harry’s dead parents, Lily and James, were not ordinary humans but a powerful witch and wizard. The Dursleys seldom speak about them, and when they do it’s always with contempt, but as Harry grows up he begins to learn about them and to learn that he, too, is a wizard, though he is not ...”

“... Apollinaire in the seat of honour as the ‘impresario of the avant-garde’. More recently Peter Read has explored in rich and rewarding detail the complex relationship between Apollinaire and Picasso, illustrating the way the ‘creative dialogue’ between them ‘fostered and inspired some of their finest art and poetry’. Apollinaire’s ...”

“... worse. In their desperation the cops had in December consulted a New York psychiatrist called James Brussel, described by John Douglas as ‘the father of behavioural profiling’. Douglas is the FBI man who inspired Thomas Harris to invent the character Jack Crawford in the Hannibal Lecter novels, so he should know. This is the psychological portrait ...”

“... with Trakl, and Decline, his pamphlet of 1952, was not reprinted. There was a larger selection by James Wright and Robert Bly in 1961; and Hamburger’s sometime collaborator Christopher Middleton edited another in the much missed Cape Editions in 1968. Yet these did not gain Trakl the attention he deserves. It is odd that an English sensibility so well ...”

“... his first wife. Morgan Phillips found that Beijing was much like Bedford. The physician Derrick James noted that Prague, visited on the way to Beijing, resembled Maidstone. Hugh Casson compared Moscow to Manchester a hundred years earlier; the great scientist Joseph Needham mystifyingly thought that Kunming was a bit like the vicarage at Duxford near ...”

“... if technically difficult way to decorate a Gothic building, was obtained from the German painter Peter von Cornelius. Hugely popular exhibitions of potential schemes were held in Westminster Hall and much discussed, for the public expected a lot for their money. The scheme was supposed to encourage artists, educate visitors, stimulate the members of the ...”

“... Anthony Deane said Petty’s design ‘must needs prove a folly’. The navy commissioner Peter Pett told Pepys that the double-hulled ship was ‘the most dangerous thing in the world’: if it was successful, the secret would get out, and it would be the ruin of English trade and sea power. The Dutch, with whom England was about to fight the second ...”

“... the travelling roadshow organised by Shaftesbury and Buckingham around the King’s bastard son, James, Duke of Monmouth, was playing to rapturous crowds. Activists among the country gentry, incensed by the long prorogation of Parliament in 1675, and by then convinced that Charles II would never accept Parliament as a partner in government, had for some ...”

“... abandon a crusade in which they have invested so much. After a lifetime’s campaigning to prove James Hanratty’s innocence, the incorruptible Paul Foot refused to accept the DNA evidence that after all Hanratty had raped Valerie Storie and therefore must have been guilty of the A6 murder. Ultimately, we are not dealing with rival scientific theories. We ...”

“... travelling in Italy with her parents; he was the family’s doctor in Rome. They had two children, Peter and Malcolm, and remained technically married until his death in 1949, though they spent very little time together and he saw almost nothing of his sons as they were growing up. ‘There seems to have been no question of passionate love on Axel’s ...”

“... boys or just plain dull boys who could, nevertheless, sing like angels. What of them?Britten and Peter Pears came disastrously to Beyond the Fringe some time in 1961. Included in the show was a parody of Britten written by Dudley Moore, in which he sang and accompanied himself in ‘Little Miss Muffet’ done in a Pears and Britten-like way. I’m not sure ...”

“... found ways to mark the city as their own. Nicholas fortified the Borgo, the area around Saint Peter’s Basilica, and rebuilt the Trevi fountain, part of an ancient system that still brought water into the city (one of the tasks, and one of the marks, of authority in Rome). Julius planned to drive a long, straight road, the Via Giulia, through the heart ...”

“... what remained of its North American possessions: in the 1840s Toronto tripled in size). As James Belich showed in Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World (2009), more British investment went to the Australian colonies in the 1870s and 1880s than anywhere else in the world. In 1835, Melbourne had no permanent ...”

“... teenagers across the country (at almost the same time, Michael Gove was sending copies of the King James Bible, with a foreword by himself, to every school in England). The government also passed a law allowing it to appoint judges even if the opposition disagreed, and seven judges loyal to Fidesz duly joined the Constitutional Court. Orbán called this the ...”

“... an exercise in grievance politics) on the part of the SNP and its then lord advocate, James Wolffe. Wolffe refused to issue a statement confirming that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute people who injected at an SDCF. Frustrated by the situation, an activist called Peter Krykant set up an ...”