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“... might now have the regal expansiveness of Paris if the Whitehall Palace that Inigo Jones and John Webb drew up for Charles I had been built. Then our prime minister might be living not in the modest decency of Downing Street but in something more like the Hôtel Matignon. Passing it and other grand houses given over to government use in the rue de ...”

“... is a bust of Beethoven and a photograph of Lenin; magazines with the faces of Marilyn Monroe and John Lennon; small vases of dead flowers and strings of gleaming beads; a tiny Jesus and Virgin Mary, bathed in blue light; and the nonpareil marker of 1970s low-cost luxury, a Black Magic chocolate box.Bedsit aftermath, campy museum ...”

“... action, as cringing as it is brave. In Henry IV, it is the women who speak the truth: ‘No, Sir John,’ Mistress Quickly says to Falstaff when he insists he knows she has been hostess to petty crime. ‘You do not know me, Sir John; I know you, Sir John.’ As with Lady Percy, it is ...”

“... bar a few hundred miles away from the mud-walled bar near Zaria, in northern Nigeria, where John Haynes’s poem is set. It opens with an evocative drift through the peppery air of the evening marketplace, past the stalls selling stock cubes and mosquito coils, and the smells of fried yam and charcoal fires, towards the coloured lights of Patience’s ...”

“... throughout his life and after his death, until, in the wake of the 1991 coup against Gorbachev, a steel rope was slipped over the thin shoulders of the Pavlik statue, and he was hauled away to join the other monsters of the Soviet era in the Museum of the ...”

“... of the hard slog of revolution. In France Deng developed a taste for coffee and football, pulled steel bars and ‘learnt about capitalism’. Back in China he once disguised himself as an antique dealer, wore a long gown and hat, and escaped arrest by seconds. He was saved from paratyphoid on the Long March by being fed condensed milk. We have a brief ...”

“... a row of Victorian terraces once used for Customs and Immigration, stand 29 pillars of sandstone, steel, I-beam and hacked, charred wood. One is inscribed with the few known names of local Aborigines – the Eora people; others with Latin and Eora names for local botanical species. Several are inset with organic materials – ash, bone, shell, resin and human ...”

“... neatly divided by four traditional ‘quarter days’ – Annunciation (25 March), the Nativity of John the Baptist (24 June), Michaelmas (29 September) and Christmas – that were used as deadlines for instalments of rent and debt.The annual religious cycle melded with older traditions of seasonal celebration, and spurred new ones too. In England the calendar ...”

“... Mars-Jones slips in a quick reference to ‘One Arm’, when the narrator, a disabled boy called John Cromer, tells us that he and a schoolfriend ‘wept together over “One Arm” – Jimmy’s tears the more surprising since he knew the story so well’. Craftily, Mars-Jones doesn’t stop to reprise the tale, and the reference is so fleeting that one ...”

“... Sue Slipman, Polly Toynbee and Rosie Barnes among them – but even such a seasoned campaigner as John Cartwright. One reads their names and wonders how true believers in Elmer Gantry felt when the charisma wore off.Crewe and King talk of the Gang of Four in almost hushed tones as if they were giants still stalking the land. Yet the fact is that their ...”

“... would collapse or explode the lungs of anyone in its path. Zuckerman placed a series of rabbits in steel cages – with only their heads sticking out – at varying distances from an epicentre and then detonated his bomb. According to doctrine, the pressure should have blown the animals to pieces. In fact, they all survived. None lost consciousness and the ...”

“... Surrey is the Country of my Birth and my delight,’ John Evelyn told John Aubrey; and like Surrey, Evelyn has had more than his fair share of bad press over the years. Yet to picture him as simply the pious sermoniser the Victorians eulogised is as misleading as to write off Surrey as wall-to-wall Weybridge ...”

“... keen on golf, tall, a considerable joker, with a thick brogue and blue eyes behind round steel-rimmed spectacles – a Scarlet Pimpernel maybe … O’Flaherty lived in – of all places – the German College, between the old palace of the Inquisition and the Vatican. It was from here … that he plotted and planned, arranging disguises and false ...”

“... Union at Cardiff (where his wife Glenys was a full-time NUS official) Kinnock, like David Steel, whose beginnings in the Student Representative Council at Edinburgh were very similar, is a standard-bearer of the Sixties generation of student politicians. But NUS politics, different entirely from the debating-society politics of the Oxbridge Unions, is ...”

“... man who gives me directions to Peckham Library. It is about three o’clock in the afternoon, on a steel-grey day two weeks after the death of Damilola Taylor. The centre of Peckham is thronged with police officers, all wearing high-visibility luminous yellow vests, and with equipment strapped around their waists on webbing belts, inflating the clothing around ...”