“... to exonerate late 19th-century British entrepreneurs from the accusations made against them by Martin Wiener and others: entrepreneurs, the argument goes, will be entrepreneurs. Thus Professor Supple sums up the record of the British coal owners in the inter-war years as follows: ‘The historical debate about entrepreneurship in the coal industry has ...”

“... American civil rights, for instance, both emerged from the Popular Front. Both Ho Chi Minh and Martin Luther King Jr could trace lines of influence back to interwar anti-fascism. Ho Chi Minh had visited the centres of the international left – working and reading in Paris, London, Harlem, Moscow and Canton. ...”

“... for children, has been singled out for praise by critics as diverse as Philip Toynbee, Francis King, Angus Wilson and Andrew Sinclair. All feel that he lacks the large audience he deserves. Yet the curious reader, anxious to gain more information about this somewhat enigmatic writer, of undoubted power (and above all vision), may easily find himself ...”

“... Agincourt, to conquer Normandy and to win the crown of France. It was a providential escape for a king K.B. McFarlane called ‘the greatest man that ever ruled England’, but as Malcolm Vale points out in the preface to his new book, it may have been formative in other ways: for all his military success, Henry would fight only one more battle, and there was ...”

“... skin. This in turn might go some way to explaining his psychopathic, prurient hatred for Martin Luther King. Hoover was compulsive in his taping and bugging of King’s highly virile private life, and in his campaign to use the tapes for blackmail. He officiated in the twisted ...”

“... at the choice of 15 January for the deadline, because it is the officially celebrated birthday of Martin Luther King and many felt that Bush either knew this and did not care or, worse still, had not noticed. But, except for a fistful of Trotskyists, all those attending the rally in Lafayette Park last weekend were ...”

“... mass movement of the century – receives only cursory attention, most of it unfavourable. Martin Luther King, Johnson says, ‘played the religious card for all it was worth’, an odd remark from an author who on all other occasions extols the role of religion in American life. Overall, Johnson’s treatment of ...”

“... blacks continued to wallow in self-pity. Boston’s Irish were not alone in their resentments. Martin Luther King was pelted with bricks when he led marches in Chicago’s Polish and Lithuanian enclaves during the summer of 1966. Throughout the 1970s, Italians in Brooklyn fiercely defended their turf from blacks. And in ...”

“... catalogue to accompany an exhibition of the hoard (at Kirkcudbright Galleries until 10 July), Martin Goldberg and Mary Davis suggest that the top layer was a ‘decoy’. If someone tried to make off with the hoard, or a piece was turned up by ploughing, the discoverers would find the cross and the silver and be so pleased that they didn’t look any ...”

“... by the well-known scene that followed the visit of the Roman missionary Paulinus at the court of King Edwin of Northumbria in 625. The King, Bede says, who had often sat alone ‘thinking about these things’, invited his nobles to do the same, and one, comparing human life to the flight of a sparrow through a lighted ...”

“... I left the village where I’d spent the night, the village where, in the ninth century, a famous king had beaten the army of a northern warlord. I climbed a steep path to a high plateau and walked along dusty tracks. There was gunfire in the distance. In the early afternoon I rested on a hilltop, on the ramparts of ancient fortifications whose shape was ...”

“... glinting eyes, in Reynolds’s 1778 portrait, stare fixedly past us from the dust-jacket of Peter Martin’s biography. Indeed the book’s steady prose, for all its professions of admiration, does little to suggest that Martin (the first writer to undertake a life of Malone since 1860) has managed to muster much of the ...”

“... No one mentioned the atrocity in Charleston explicitly; no one had to. We were in the church where Martin Luther King declared his opposition to the Vietnam War in 1967. We were honouring the life of America’s leading free jazz musician in a dramatic week for freedom in America. The Supreme Court had ruled five to four in ...”

“... with the Black Panthers. But there was no one he worked harder or more ingeniously to destroy than Martin Luther King. Sullivan, who ran the FBI operation against King, suggests that Hoover couldn’t stand ‘King’s repeated criticism of the ...”

“... reform in local government and the dictatorial treatment of local authorities by the Heseltine-King regime. Gwyneth Dunwoody, in a most constructive essay on the health services, adopts a similar line of attack. All this laborious shoring up of the post-war status quo, however, is too much for Neil Kinnock, who, almost alone, tries to strike a radical ...”