“... so early in the morning and the mercury has touched the middle eighties, already, and shows no sign of slowing down its headlong ascent. As far as clothes were concerned, women only appeared to get off more lightly. On this morning, when, after breakfast and the performance of a few household duties, Lizzie Borden will murder her parents, she will, on ...”

“... shall we begin? How far back do you want to go?Why don’t we go back to the Battle of Bannockburn?No, not that far. Your schooling. Your birthplace.King’s Lynn. I was born in Norfolk.Were both your parents Scottish?Yes.And your father was an engineer?Yes. A civil engineer, built sewers, I think.– Which is a very Scottish thing to be doing.Building ...”

“... and a great deal of cold water ... he says it is useless, that I am going to do a thing with no basis to do it on ... “Look I am going to forge a weapon for you; and thus I too work with you in the overthrow of Society.” To which he replied: “The weapon is too small to be of any value.” ’ Ashbee’s experiments, from the workshops of the Guild ...”

“... let alone what the matches meant to millions of ardent fans. Listeners and viewers have been no less ardent about some of the BBC’s programmes, as a ceaseless correspondence of complaint and enthusiasm has made clear over the decades, but how far can historians capture the subjective experience of the living room and integrate it into institutional ...”

“... the ambiguities and resorts to conventional wisdom. His list of leaders includes Harry Truman and John Kennedy – two presidents who risked war by exacerbating tensions with the Soviet Union. Dallek views FDR from the perspective of a mid-century liberal who has apparently made his peace with the warfare state. As Dallek sees him, FDR, like his cousin ...”

“... poets who are not greatly involved with the styles or personalities of their time, whose work sets no puzzles and makes a sufficiently vivid impression all by itself. It’s hard to disagree with Elsie, who after her husband’s death sold his books and artefacts, destroyed letters and wrote to an earlier would-be biographer: ‘I must say that a critical ...”

“... from, say, the Occupy movement through #MeToo to Black Lives Matter) that it’s astounding – no, instructive – to realise they were written twenty, forty, fifty years ago:at your tabletelephone ringsevery four minutestalkof terrible thingsthe papers bringingno good news                                (‘New York’)False history gets ...”

“... George ran for mayor of New York and finished ahead of Teddy Roosevelt, though behind the Tammany Hall candidate. Henry George Foundations still exist in London, Melbourne and his native Philadelphia. Liberal Democrats in Britain continue to hanker after George’s single land tax to replace all other taxes, as do some American conservatives. All the ...”

“... Suffering from depression, he was analysed by the perceptive but corrupt psychotherapist John Layard, who went to bed with him; his father paid for the analysis, and Layard, when Redgrove explained the Game to him, said simply: ‘That’s your mother.’ With its epitaph from Baudelaire – ‘C’est elle! Noire et pourtant ...”

“... Christopher Harper-Mercer​ wrote that he had no life. He had no girlfriend and no job; the world was against him. He lived with his mother only a few miles from the Umpqua Community College campus in Roseburg, Oregon, and he collected guns. He shot nine people dead at the college on 1 October and injured nine others before killing himself ...”

“... brainless and hearty younger brother, Arthur, could inherit instead. ‘Sainty’ Belchamber has no taste for games, girls or money; in his new introduction to the novel, Edmund White calls him a ‘sissy’, which is about right, though, oddly, Cissy is the name of the pitiless young woman Sainty is trapped into marrying. Sturgis never makes any play on ...”

“... Jazz Age of the 1920s, when Wall Street first went public. He pegs the number of investors then at no more than 14 million, or 13 per cent of the population, but at the time it seemed as though everyone was playing: doctors, plumbers and the women in beauty parlours. The Street shed its moral stigma and became fun; Groucho Marx speculated on the strength of ...”

“... settlement, as in North America and Rhodesia. The settlers declared independence only when they no longer required the Mother Country’s soldiers to subdue the natives. Presenting Israelis as colonisers, rather than as enemies of imperialism, was once the preserve of Palestinian and Marxist writers. Many Palestinians, notably Nur Masalaha, have done ...”

“... years, her personal life, politics (I never knew whether or how she voted), or anything practical. No exchange of recipes. No mention of sport. ‘Anita, what do you think of Ireland’s chances in the Six Nations?’ was not a question that ever came to my lips. I remember her telling me that she had just finished a novel ...”

“... it really doesn’t matter if ITV gets an interview with someone. The important thing is that no one else from the BBC gets it. Given that the BBC’s news programmes, under ever tighter managerial control, increasingly look and sound the same, the only one that has a genuine case for deploying its own correspondents is Radio 1’s Newsbeat, which not ...”