“... to sustain the organisation and all its activities without more and more frequent trips to the Home Office for bigger and bigger increases in the licence fee. It was inevitable that sooner or later some government would shout enough. What is perhaps surprising is that an administration so keen to break the old political consensus, so dedicated to reducing ...”

“... exporting papermaking machinery to 56 countries. Hewlett, born in 1874, felt quite at home with the paternalism which could flourish within a firm that remained in the hands of a single family, though he deplored ‘the harder and less human atmosphere’ which came with technological change. He didn’t disdain the Johnson’s dividends he ...”

“... pied piper, or ‘mouse queen’. In fact she loathed mice and had been kept prisoner in her own home by packs of the creatures scurrying around. Sleep was out of the question: as soon as she shut her eyes, the mice would crawl over her. Far from feeding them, she spent her time chasing as many as she could out of her house onto the roof . . . And so ...”

“... carrying rifles and riot shields descended on Columbia Heights, a suburb of Minneapolis. At the home of ChingLy ‘Scott’ Thao, a US citizen, they knocked quickly before shattering the front door with a battering ram. They yanked Thao, who was wearing only bright blue boxers and Crocs, out into the sub-zero cold and bundled him into a black SUV. For about ...”

“... The PLO might recognise Israel. The Poles pretend Walesa’s not in gaol. But history here at home is the two Krays Let out of clink to mourn their saintly mother. The boys for all their rough-and-tumble ways Both loved her as they never loved another. People repaired with grafts, pins, splints and stays Still can’t decide which was the nicer brother ...”

“... as a lush Gainsborough melodrama in 1944, launching the careers of James Mason (the villainous Lord Manderstoke) and Stewart Granger (heroic Harry). The Balliol-educated son of an Oxford don, Sadleir was a publisher with Constable and eventually ran the firm. He was also the greatest Victorian bibliophile of his generation and his collection is now held in ...”

“... the absence of any indication, after they were published, that the deeply studious, concentrated, home-keeping Mrs Lewes was a likely person to have produced their successors. Before the publication of his first book, Continent, in 1986, Jim Crace worked as a freelance features journalist for the Sunday Telegraph. He’d written a few short stories, some ...”

“... even though Leo’s mother had been a Hungarian Jew and Leo himself had been attacked by Lord Haw-Haw as ‘the half-Jew Leopold Amery’. At one stage Jack asserted that the victory of the German armies was ‘necessary in order that small children shall no longer be the victims of the Jews’. He also attempted to recruit British POWs to fight for ...”

“... slogans. More attentive reading, however, revealed that this was poetry: ‘I sing and appeal: Lord, give birth to a calf!’ ‘Look at the fat thighs/Of this obscene wall./Here the nuns at night/Remove Christ’s trousers.’ ‘Citizens, change/The underclothes of your souls!’ These words came courtesy of the Order of Imaginists, a group of ...”

“... who had hoped to take part in the climb, joined the search for the bodies. They never found Lord Francis Douglas. The chaplain decided to bury what there was of the other three in the snow and read over them the 90th Psalm, from a prayer-book found in the pocket of the dead divine, the Rev. Charles Hudson. Unsurprisingly, the Swiss authorities were ...”

“... the housing crisis in the Highlands and the unwillingness of any government to tackle second-home ownership; the characterisation of the region as a place of picturesque wildness, a holiday destination, which implicitly classes infrastructure as an anomaly; and the continuing waste and environmental damage from field sports (inhibited woodland ...”

“... of the German declaration of war on Russia, ‘he found the PM and ladies playing bridge – and Lord Crewe said it was like playing on top of a coffin. They waited till they had finished – about an hour.’ The same code applied on the Tory side. When some MPs went to haul Bonar Law back to London from a Thameside weekend party in order to denounce the ...”

“... in the index. The assassination of Aldo Moro is referred to five times; the assassinations of Lord Moyne and of Count Bernadotte are not mentioned at all. The root cause of Arab violence is thus suppressed, and we are then given to understand Arab violence has no cause at all. It is mere violence for its own sake. At the time, as Mr Townshend says, the ...”

“... her chosen male mentors, Higginson most prominent among them; her late, happy romance with Judge Lord; Austin’s prolonged adultery with Mabel Loomis Todd, the young wife of an Amherst College astronomy professor; and the unexpected discovery after the poet’s death of nearly 1800 short poems. The stories of heartbreak and mental breakdown that colour so ...”

“... virtue and learning. Everybody’s advocate and a model judge, he is a splendid public servant, at home and abroad. Colet used to call him England’s only genius. As clever as he is good, More is a living refutation of the belief that true Christians are to be found only in monasteries. Erasmus’s More, pictured as dragged to Henry’s court and moving ...”