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“... for a brief geography lesson by the BBC’s defence correspondent, an ex-admiral, over a map. Michael Peacock, our editor, had decided to lead the programme with George Mikes’s Hungarian report. The management – in the person of the formidable, unforgettable Grace Wyndam-Goldie, a kind of pre-incarnation of Margaret Thatcher – thought ...”

“... over so much of our lives to this crap: we turn on Baywatch, we buy tickets to Eraser, we christen Michael Jackson the King of Pop and indulge him in his public psychosis (except for Jarvis Cocker, bless his heart). If our actions were involuntary – if, say, Home Improvement was forced on us in the same way that the two-minute hate was forced on the ...”

“... the port and nuts (before the brandy stage): Thou who when cares attack, bidst them avaunt and black Care from the horseman’s back, vaulting unseatest. Sweet when blah blah in clay, sweet when they’ve cleared away Lunch and at close of day, Possibly sweetest. Calverley goes on to heap scorn on those who impugn the habit, ridiculing the notion that it ...”

“... him that he was afraid to write. ‘Of what am I afraid?’ Sheridan asked. ‘You are afraid,’ Michael Kelly replied, ‘of the author of The School for Scandal.’ It is the kind of thing that people say to writers who have stopped writing and chosen to do something more immediately practical in the world. Chedzoy quotes the London Evening Post of 8 May ...”

“... scene. One of my strongest memories of the Mall was of something absolutely untypical: an elderly black woman singing hymns in a cracked voice without regard for anyone else. She was singing for Diana alone. More typically, almost every bouquet was accompanied by a card, letter or poem. There was some surprise that the flowers were left in paper or ...”

“... Hall by contrast plunges straight into the unfamiliar world of Early Modern technology, the ‘black box’ as he calls it, whose inputs and outputs are commonly known to historians but whose inner functions are felt to be of no interest. Historians of technology (a small group) are concerned with the logic of technology, general historians, including ...”

“... volume of poetry, War’s Embers, appeared in 1919.Gurney’s previous biographer, the composer Michael Hurd, believed his subject’s truest vocation was music and that the songs are a greater achievement than the poetry. Trevor Hold, also a composer, disagreed, arguing that Gurney’s poetry is ‘more original than [the] music’. I am on Hold’s ...”

“... The man awoke to find himself healed, but for the rest of his life, he had one white leg and one black. Not all miracles healed. The saints could also liberate prisoners, bring rain or fair weather, give children to the barren and bring about victory in combat or in court. But when scorned, they wrought ferocious miracles of punishment. Saints not only ...”

“... editions of the Pevsner Suffolk guide. Once slim, pocketable and beige, the volumes are now black, thick, and less handy. This may be the last print edition of the series. A digital version would expand the guides’ uses: and if you don’t have the right sort of imagination to visualise interiors or exteriors from written detail alone – I struggle ...”

“... York’, expresses his familiar apocalyptic sensibility, suggesting that New York has become a ‘black utopia’, a place where skyscrapers collapse into infernos and the repressed roots of urban fear return with spectacular fury. ‘It’s conceivable that bin Laden et al have put a silver stake in the heart of the “downtown revival” in New York and ...”

“... safe. It was absorbed through the skin and poisoned patients and surgeons, causing kidney damage (black urine was a tell-tale symptom). And laboratory tests showed that it was much less lethal for bacteria than expected. The notion that it was no good in theory, even if it worked in practice, caused serious damage to its reputation.Sterilising dressings and ...”

“... next volume like crack,’ Zadie Smith writes. As the literary critic – and former junkie – Michael Clune has pointed out, we tend to reach for drug metaphors when we find ourselves taking pleasure in a book without being able to ascribe our interest to respectable literary values. Is Knausgaard, despite all the comparisons to Proust, more like reality ...”

“... in tandem. And while Palmer concentrated on white revolutionaries, in his 1938 classic, The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James successfully revived interest in the slaves and free blacks active in Saint-Domingue’s revolution in 1791. Arguing that liberty, equality and fraternity meant even more to the enslaved in France’s richest Caribbean colony than to ...”

“... Occupy Handbook, one essay that stands out is an old-fashioned piece of historical reportage by Michael Hiltzik. It’s called ‘The 5 per cent’, and it tells the story of the campaign during the 1930s to secure a decent social security programme for the elderly. In 1934, the number of Americans over the age of 65 was seven million, or just 5 per cent of ...”

“... time of the general election in April 1992, at which Major squeaked home for another term. When Black Wednesday came in September, the forcible ejection of sterling from the ERM was, by rights, as much a refutation of Labour’s official policy as of the government’s; but this time it was the Conservatives who suffered as the party of devaluation. Had ...”