“... defining its mission. When Ealing was sold in 1955, he placed a plaque on the studio building that read: ‘Here during a quarter of a century many films were made projecting Britain and the British character.’ For Boomers like me, treated to an endless cycle of these films on afternoon television in the 1960s and 1970s, they offered a wonderful cinematic ...”

“... what became the Nazi party. The inscription on the 1923 naval officers’ war memorial at Mürwik read: ‘Nicht klagen, noch einmal wagen’ (‘Grieve not, but try again’). In the 1930s, the German navy prepared to try again with a new submarine division, but the British continued to misunderstand its intentions. They knew how dangerous a weapon the ...”

“... of Anasazi society. Instead, it concentrates uncompromisingly on the bones, and attempts to read the society exclusively through them. For reasons that remain obscure, the social system based in the Chaco Canyon came to a sudden end. Sometime around 1150 AD, the inhabitants of the Great Houses appear to have abandoned them, leaving behind granaries full ...”

“... alone.’Yet Church was right: Elsie was central to Stevens’s poethood, although she refused to read his later poetry and resented his literary success. As part of his five-year courtship of her he composed a pair of 20-poem sequences, ‘Book of Verses’, which he presented to her on her 22nd birthday in 1908, and ‘The Little June Book’, given the ...”

“... first approached in July 2010 by a correspondent who preferred to remain anonymous. He said he had read her work and wondered if she might be interested in looking at his collection of papyrus fragments, one of which pointed, as he put it, ‘towards a Gnostic gospel, in which Jesus and a disciple had an argument about Mary’. King, who had publicly suggested ...”

“... seal on Magna Carta and the supporting Charter of the Forests. Carpenter’s two volumes should be read in conjunction with his magisterial edition of Magna Carta for Penguin Classics.*In return, Parliament granted the king the last great tax he was to receive for thirty years. It was Henry’s doing that Parliaments increasingly met at his preferred residence ...”

“... crevasse between the SF/fantasy audience and the wider literate public. People who don’t usually read, say, thrillers or military history or popular science will read, say, Gone Girl or Berlin or Bad Pharma. But people who don’t read fantasy just simply, permanently, 100 per cent ...”

“... since gone broke and were at the point of extinction. Those stuffy apartments came to mind as I read about Cavafy’s home in the old Greek quarter in Alexandria, crowded with his mother’s furniture. On the lower floor was a brothel, one of the many on his street, with a church and a hospital also nearby. One can imagine him sitting late into the night in ...”

“... Reading Myself and Others. The Ghost Writer, ‘My True Story’, etc. In the preface to the last Peter Tarnopol solemnly announced that something truer than true was on its way: ‘Presently Mr Tarnopol is preparing to forsake fiction for a while and embark upon an autobiographical narrative, an endeavour which he approaches warily, uncertain as to both its ...”

“... she was also put in the lowest grade, in her case 1G. Our parents were working-class and when I read in Todd’s book that ‘working-class children were likely to find themselves relegated to the lowest streams of grammar schools, regardless of their eleven-plus results,’ I was naturally disposed to agree. Then again, what evidence was there that my ...”

“... that Locke is the nation’s founding philosopher-grandfather: ‘Oh, I know Locke! I think we read his Second Treatise in school. He’s the small government, life, liberty, property guy, right?’ It’s widely assumed that Locke’s political philosophy fed a ‘continuous stream of American political thought’ from the 18th century to the ...”

“... state for Scotland, drove by in his motorcade: ‘This Scar Will Never Heal!’ one of the banners read. To this day, many Glaswegians would agree.In 2022 a London-based urban designer called Peter Kelly set up a campaign group called Replace the M8. Kelly believes there is a nostalgia for ‘the completeness of the ...”

“... are the quintessential sign behind shopping, browsing, culture-sampling and tourism. You might read the Home Office street front as an aspirational allegory. On ground level, we are supplied with nature, the raw stuff of the world. Over that, we impose our urban grids, our political structures. Yet, ultimately, we reach up towards ‘quality’, a je ne ...”

“... effects of policy-wonking on circulation. He became a management consultant, author and adviser to Peter Mandelson. Living on Thin Air is, for the most part, a celebration of hip and chaotic capitalism. It is written in the regulation giddy style that Thomas Frank and the Baffler school in Chicago have dissected so well. Once again we are presented with the ...”

“... man’s widow. The significant thing, though, is that Marrot’s generation (his book was widely read and instantly reprinted) retained a faith in the writer not just as hero but as a kind of secular saint. Recalling the mild furore a few years ago over Robert Gittings’s life of Hardy, with its intimations that the great advocate of loving-kindness could ...”