“... list of targets. Thorpe’s maternal grandfather was an imperial adventurer nicknamed Empire Jack who, like Thorpe’s sister, eventually committed suicide; his paternal grandfather was an archdeacon. In May 1968, Thorpe married Caroline Allpass, who died in a car crash 11 days after the 1970 general election. His second wife, Marion Stein, was a refugee ...”

“... packs of cigarettes as well as rolling tobacco and e-cigarettes.Last year the poverty campaigner Jack Monroe complained in a viral tweet thread that headline inflation numbers were failing to capture how much more steeply the cost of budget food items was rising for the poorest. Monroe was right, which was nothing statisticians at the ONS weren’t already ...”

“... reporting became gloriously addictive. Two of the paper’s greatest investigative reporters were Jack Newfield and Mary Nichols. My (no doubt screen) memory is of them sitting hunched over their desks, a telephone clipped to each ear, receiving dirt from some informant at the end of one wire, and checking it with a reliable source on the other. For Newfield ...”

“... Five poets performed. Kenneth Rexroth, the consigliore of radicalism, was master of ceremonies. Jack Kerouac, too self-conscious to read, acted as cheerleader: ‘Go! Go! Go!’ He passed out slopping gallon jugs of Californian Burgundy. There had been poetry readings in the Bay Area before this and the Six Gallery was hardly virgin territory. The space had ...”

“... most basic. At Tamai in March 1884, when Graham ordered the Black Watch to move forward, Captain Andrew Scott-Stevenson found himself in danger of being overcome by a throng of Dervishes until ‘my trusty claymore found its way to the hilt into several black devils. I clove a piece out of one of their heads just as one does an egg for breakfast and saw his ...”

“... Buzz Aldrin became the first men on the Moon and less than a year before the Apollo 17 astronauts Jack Schmitt and Gene Cernan became the last. Between July 1969 and December 1972, 21 astronauts left on Apollo missions to put men on the Moon; 12 actually walked on the lunar surface, of whom nine are still alive. Each mission was made up of three men, one of ...”

“... began to make an important contribution to steamboat revenues, though, as the marine historian Andrew Clark notes, ‘it was the enthusiastically reported visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1847 that glamorised and popularised the West Highlands for the wider world, opening up the region’s commercial potential for keen-eyed ...”

“... to play Scripps the religious boy, and doesn’t even bother to mention that he plays the piano; Andrew Knott from Wakefield, who comes in like the wind has blown the door open and knows the scene off by heart, as do several of the others. This is new, as actors would normally expect to read the scene and if they are bad readers, as many actors are, this ...”

“... of Iraq, sat in the garden of his Baghdad villa while a young internet entrepreneur called Jack Dorsey tried to persuade him that he needed to be on Twitter. Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, was in Baghdad at the invitation of the State Department. Over the previous three days, he and eight other Silicon Valley bigwigs, kitted out with helmets and flak ...”

“... in the postwar years. By far the greatest military figure wartime Britain produced was Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, the victor of Taranto and Cape Matapan, whose remit it was, as commander in chief of the Mediterranean theatre, to protect the British army in North Africa. Yet there is no mention of Montgomery in Cunningham’s autobiography, A Sailor’s ...”

“... community’ of Scotland only exist completely in song? Can it live by culture alone? Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, a bitter opponent of the 1707 Union, quoted a famous saying: ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ The novelist James Robertson loves this; he complains that ...”

“... Abbey’ since those were built in the 18th century. Barker’s book makes fruitful use of Andrew Prescott’s doctoral thesis on the judicial records of the rising and Carolyn Fenwick’s three-volume edition of the poll tax returns of 1377, 1379 and 1381. One striking fact to emerge is the degree to which the poll tax of 1381 was evaded: what ...”

“... up their two children: Paul, the historian and author of There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, and Darla-Jane, a dress designer and teacher (Gilroy herself looks super stylish in the photographs in this book; her outfits have been included in exhibitions at the V&A). It isn’t hard to see in Paul Gilroy’s work his mother’s refusal of racial ...”

“... Reader bears the inscription: ‘Steal not this book for fear of life for the owner has a big jack-knife.’ Jackson’s sharpest insight is that annotations buttonhole not only the author of the printed book, but future readers of the marked-up copy, who can respond by preserving (Southey traced over Coleridge’s pencil jottings in ink) or destroying (a ...”

“... McAlister spoke, he was bouncing a sharpened pencil against the surface of the desk, a Union Jack pencil. I asked him if the presence of cameras didn’t just cause crime to be displaced. Didn’t people just go to places where there were no cameras? ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but we’re beginning to cover the blind spots. We have four mobile units. When we ...”