“... trips.Early in his career, Gott stood in the 1966 Hull North by-election. On 7 November 1965, Henry Solomons, the Labour MP for the constituency, died after a short illness. He had won the marginal seat from the Tories at the 1964 general election with a majority of 1181 votes on a turnout of 47,717. His death reduced the parliamentary majority of Harold ...”

“... remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.’ Is it a dream or a nightmare, a democratic paradise or a bastion of white supremacy and religious ...”

“... unleashed the Turkish invasion, which in two instalments defeated the not very robust efforts of Henry Kissinger and James Callaghan to call a halt, and which had the effect of precipitating that vast shift in populations that was the requisite preliminary to the achievement of the Turkish Cypriot programme of 1964. The ...”

“... of their own aspirations – despite modern prejudices against absolute monarchy and murder. James Mackay, for example, prefaces his own account of the Queen with similar remarks about her current significance: I make no apology for offering this fresh look at Mary. Writing in the aftermath of the devolution debate and referendum, I have been forcibly ...”

“... eccentricity’. Certainly that is the reputation which has stuck to his best-known predecessor, Henry George. In his 1879 bestseller, Progress and Poverty, George set out the same thumping principle which inspires Linklater: ‘The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political and consequently the ...”

“... a pig’s back). We stare out along the coast to Tory Island, the home of the great naive painter, James Dixon. Below us Donegal is green, still, silent and peaceful. I’m too tired that evening to open either Himself Alone or The Idiot, and in any case I want to a make a start on a new book, a collection of short essays on single poems. I wish I’d packed a ...”

“... to look at one of the surviving copes from the set of vestments given to Westminster Abbey by Henry VII. Anthony Symondson has written about its subsequent history in a piece in the Catholic Herald and how, via a 17th-century second-hand dealer in London and the Catholic college at St Omer, it eventually ended up at Stonyhurst. The vestments were designed ...”

“... baked beans, cling peaches and custard powder, the staples of such occasions, and which, as Clive James noted, will later be distributed among the poor and devout old ladies who contributed them in the first place. A truer symbol of the locality’s harvest would, I suppose, be a sheaf of emails or a roll of print-outs, electronics round here more profitable ...”

“... Louis Daguerre announced his ability to ‘seize the light’, a claim soon rephrased by William Henry Fox Talbot as the art of ‘fixing a shadow’. As for 1865, it’s the year that marks, along with much else, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the end of the American Civil War, and the inauguration of photography’s increasingly public role in the ...”

“... to women. The First World War offered a way out of her violent and miserable first marriage to James Marr and she came to London with her young son to take up a position at the Ministry of Munitions, responsible for women’s welfare in the department of aircraft manufacture. After the war she changed her surname to Spry, implying that she was married to ...”

“... book on The Aspern Papers. For a long time, he couldn’t figure out why he was so fascinated by Henry James’s narrator. ‘One day it hit me. The guy’s gay! … His relationships with all the women characters were those of a gay man. Now, not an openly gay man or even a consciously gay man. But a man who was just not heterosexual at his core. I ...”

“... you need an authorial dandy like Townsend Warner to sustain. Other tragedies stay tragic. Reading Henry James’s The Bostonians as a rewrite of Zola’s Nana doesn’t cancel the cruelty of his treatment of Olive Chancellor’s love for Verena, but it does establish Olive as a specifically lesbian tragic heroine, and so credits ...”

“... Nicaragua. George Bush recruited Manuel Noriega to the CIA. As the Watergate hounds closed in, Henry Kissinger was implored to sink to his Jewish knees and join Richard Nixon in prayer on the Oval Office carpet, and complied. Klaus Barbie was plucked from the SS ‘Most Wanted’ list and, with many of his confrères, given a second career in American ...”

“... 1972, five burglars were caught trying to plant a bug. The group comprised an electronics expert, James McCord, and four Cuban-Americans from Miami. It didn’t take the police and the FBI long to discover that McCord was the security co-ordinator for the Campaign to Re-Elect the President, known by its acronym – at once sinister and hapless – CREEP. The ...”