“... about mastibation’. After this disgrace – deeply shocking to his family, who were stern North Staffordshire Methodists – he was despatched to a Children’s Home on the Lancashire moors, arriving in a blizzard as wild and dramatic as the storm in the opening pages of Oliver Twist. But the Children’s ...”

“... associations of the term ‘coalition’ are deep-rooted in British politics. The short-lived Fox-North coalition of 1783 became a byword for low cynicism and a willingness to seize power at whatever cost. According to George III, it was ‘the most daring and unprincipled faction that the annals of the kingdom ever produced’. Military defeat in the ...”

“... to his future professional activities. This emerged clearly from the survey of 15 centres in North America, including the one described in this book, which I conducted 20 years ago with the aim of assessing psychiatric training programmes in order to evaluate their possible relevance for the United Kingdom. The general picture certainly included a ...”

“... selves. They were like a schizoid Robinson Crusoe, their island a cramped upstairs bedroom in a North Wales semi. When, like Crusoe, they discovered the self needed its Friday, they began stalking the American boys at the nearby airbase, eventually offering up their virginities to a loathsome American narcissist, the glue-sniffing Carl. Each twin hoped to ...”

“... probably seemed an excellent investment at the time. Such schemes comprise what the journalist Oliver Bullough calls kleptocracy. Moneyland, his impassioned but at times specious book, depicts the universe inhabited by global money launderers and calls out the Western bankers, lawyers, property brokers and politicians who profit from it. Kleptocracy works ...”

“... As a boy, though, for me its most numinous holding was a large felt hat reputed to be that of Oliver Cromwell with a bullet hole in the crown to prove it. Visiting Temple Newsam was always a treat, as it still is more than half a century later. Back in 1947, though, with the country in the throes of the postwar economic crisis, the push was on for more ...”

“... later. There are vital aspects of Liszt’s music and personality that are barely touched on by Oliver Hilmes’s new biography, but as a well-told, readable, fluently translated story of a strangely conflicted career that affected the lives of people as disparate as Lola Montez and Pope Pius IX it would be hard to beat. Hilmes does himself no favours with ...”

“... present to be affected, sea levels rose to drown what’s known as Doggerland, create the North Sea and cut off Britain and Ireland from the European continent and each other. It’s not surprising, then, that we can see evidence of massive changes of behaviour: long barrows giving way to stone circles, circles and walkways in their turn slighted or ...”

“... George III’s failure to behave like a despot, his prim reluctance to invoke the cause of his North American dominions in defiance of Parliament, which eventually compelled American patriots in 1776 to reject the king. Why, Americans wondered, would George III not act to curb the pretensions of a despised Parliament bent on usurping an imperial authority ...”

“... to go. The older fraternity brothers decided to use one of the new pledges as a rule, and selected Oliver R. Smoot, the shortest of the lot at 5ft 7in. The other pledges laid Smoot out at one end of the bridge, marked his extent with chalk and paint, then picked him up and laid him down again, spelling out the full measurement every ten lengths, and inscribing ...”

“... is about such businesses. In the 1980s, waste became a national export across much of the global North. Since then, firms have made vast amounts of money by sending the rich world’s waste to the global South. At first, the focus of this business was hazardous waste like asbestos or paint sludge. In countries like the US it cost as much as $250 per tonne to ...”

“... George Cony​ , a London merchant, had once been a friend of Oliver Cromwell. But when the Lord Protector slapped a tax on silk imports without the consent of Parliament, Mr Cony protested that this was the sort of arbitrary behaviour for which Cromwell had lambasted the late king, and demanded that the unjust tax be repaid to him ...”

“... us what young Nathan said to him: ‘Would you really rather belong to generations of English North Country clodhoppers and dolts or even landowning bullies and villains than to the ancient people of Heine, to say nothing of the people of Goethe and Beethoven?’ Old Wharton thought for a long time about this, then answered: ‘Yes.’ But he recognises ...”

“... find the complete movie on YouTube. Almost everything these days is retrievable, it seems. James Oliver draws attention to this in one of the useful contextualising essays interspersed through the book, writing that many of the films highlighted in Offbeat have become easier to view in the decade since the first edition was published, which is important ...”

“... expansion into the Crimea and most of present-day Ukraine had been paralleled, further north, by the partition of Poland after a series of agreements between Russia, Austria and Prussia. These agreements were possible, in large part, because of the disruption of European diplomacy caused by bitter Anglo-French discord. During the Crimean War, there ...”