“... shed light on the violent groups that peppered working-class communities and provided the foot soldiers for New York’s Democratic Party. Most subsequent accounts construed the Dead Rabbit-Bowery Boy Riot as the most violent in a string of battles between Irish and nativist gangs and an extension of the struggle between Mayor Wood and the politicians ...”

“... were also applied to discussions about politics, race and economic utility. Hegel never set foot in South America but described the Amazon as ‘monstrous’ and compared it unfavourably to the Mississippi Valley, which had allowed a harmonious civil society to take root. George Kennan, who did visit South America, used what he imagined to be the ...”

“... who had been killed by a Valmara or had stepped on a small pressure mine and was missing a foot or the lower part of a leg. I used to tell this story as an illustration of the resilience of ordinary Kurds in their long struggle against poverty and oppression. For almost a century the Kurds had been savagely treated: first by the British in the ...”

“... In the spring of 1974, as reports multiplied of his involvement with crooks such as John Poulson and T. Dan Smith, Reginald Maudling disappeared to Paris with his wife, Beryl. The Daily Mail’s Harry Longmuir had little difficulty locating him in the ‘Président’ suite of the George V. Checking in himself, Longmuir spent a whole Sunday morning with a confused, disorientated Maudling in his dressing-gown ...”

“... Unity. A visitor to Swinbrook, the family home, reported that the second anyone put their foot through the door, Decca and Unity would appear, demanding: ‘Are you a Fascist or a Communist?’ When this particular guest answered, ‘Neither – I’m a democrat,’ they sniffed in unison, ‘How wet!’ and wandered off. Interestingly, after the ...”

“... Body. The serial stuff-strutters include the photo-artists Gilbert & George, Cindy Sherman and John Coplans; the sculptors Jeff Koons, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn; the painters Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville; the performance and video artists Joseph Beuys, Rebecca Horn, Bruce Nauman, Arnulf Rainer and Matthew Barney. Their work commonly ...”

“... held in a cell below the tide line. His cell fills up with seawater twice a day, leaving only a foot of air in which to breathe. His jailer, Pobjoy, brings him scraps of tattered parchment, on which he paints clichéd ‘scenes of bucolick bliss’. Pobjoy sells the paintings for his own profit, but Gould hoards enough of the materials to write his illegal ...”

“... humour was born in the trenches. Oscar Wilde’s clever formulations no longer sufficed. The five-foot-two eyes-of-blue Charleston danced by the ‘It’ generation required a leg position as awkward as the knock-kneed pose of Nijinsky’s corps de ballet. The madcap crazes of the 1920s, the frenetic club culture and the incidence of social deviance were a ...”

“... he immediately looked into the possibility of winning the hand of her half-sister, Elizabeth. Don John of Austria, Philip’s illegitimate half-brother, later to achieve immortality at Lepanto and the son of a scullery maid at a hotel in Regensburg where Charles had once stayed, also fancied his chances at bringing England back to the True Faith, offering ...”

“... their products were becoming less and less affordable. The government then shot itself in the foot by abolishing exchange controls at the end of 1979, rendering the mechanism for controlling bank lending (and thus M) entirely ineffective. It was now impossible to stop banks from moving into the mortgage market, from which they had previously been ...”

“... it is a mixture of Frank Auerbach and a painter who used to show at Helen Lessore [Gallery] called John Bratby – Lucian’s work seems to be just a display of technique.’ I can’t help thinking he was referring particularly to the portrait of Susanna with two whippets.Susanna lived with her husband, Alexander Chancellor, and their two daughters. She and ...”

“... control their own fate: ‘We are out for life and all that life can give us,’ the revolutionary John Maclean said at his trial for sedition in 1918. George Square, 31 January 1919 My grandparents met at a Glasgow ILP branch sometime around the end of the First World War, and I’ve always had a rather romantic view of the party and of that ...”

“... radio. Indeed, the onset of television pushed a lot of well-known radio announcers onto the back foot, and several struggled to make the move. Some who did, such as Gilbert Harding (another Cambridge graduate and former schoolteacher, later a famously agitated contestant on What’s My Line?), were known for their melancholy and their loneliness as well as ...”

“... face lifted for the fourth time – the Doctors say no more), then Cecil [Beaton] and John Gielgud came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arturo Lopez’s yacht … Oh yes, I forgot Noel Coward – he fell in love with Jack. Jack hated it All. Later, in his thirties, he would tire also of the Greeks: ‘The children are so horrid: have ...”

“... had a bad stammer, and his puns were delivered with effort, after a period of voiceless struggle. John Clare described him approaching ‘a joke or a pun with an inward sort of utterance ere he can give it speech till his tongue becomes a sort of Packmans strop turning it over and over till at last it comes out wetted as keen as a razor.’ De Quincey ...”