“... placed for their own ‘care’. The first inquiry is into abuse in private and council homes in North Wales and follows an earlier inquiry commissioned by Clwyd County Council (now disbanded) and conducted by a high-powered team of three experts led by John Jillings, a former director of social services in ...”

“... Diego Rivera’s The Marriage of the Artistic Expression of the North and of the South on this Continent was painted in front of an audience at the Golden Gate International Exposition, on San Francisco’s Treasure Island, during the summer of 1940. It was Rivera’s last mural in the US and remains one of his most complicated achievements – both a celebration of cultural exchange and a condemnation of what Frida Kahlo called ‘Gringolandia ...”

“... metaphor, deployed as the Volunteer is leaving the ‘broad brown murk’ of the Humber – ‘To north and south, a scanty shoreline welds the rusted steel of estuary and sky’ – welds the supposed opposites of nature and industry (and the rust is a reminder that industry is not immune to nature, that the destructive effects work in both directions). Also ...”

“... Infinitely more profound and productive than his nearest 18th-century equivalent, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, he was also far more prominent in national politics over a much longer span than John Milton or the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury in the 17th century, J.S. Mill in the 19th century, and Bertrand Russell ...”

“... the US. A new spirit of patriotism was stirring as Japan continued its creeping aggression in the north. Army recruits were given lectures on ‘The Coming Sino-Japanese War’ and ‘How to Make Sacrifices’. Not everyone shared the enthusiasm. Children at a school in Jiangsu who were too poor to buy their textbooks complained that they would have to ...”

“... than twenty years elapsed between the discovery of extensive stone artefacts in the Nile Valley, north of Aswan, and the appearance in print of the definitive publication on yet another fragment of human prehistory. The story of the discoveries deriving from the Palaeolithic to Neolithic periods is one of infinite pains taken by unusually patient men and ...”

“... Nixon had flirted with using nuclear weapons in conversations with Henry Kissinger during the North Vietnamese offensive of spring 1972. When Kissinger told him it ‘would just be too much’, Nixon was outraged: ‘I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.’ Kissinger soon learned to think big. At the Paris peace talks in December, he ...”

“... Ian Rankin’s novel Knots & Crosses introduced us to a tough Edinburgh Detective Sergeant called John Rebus. A series of local girls had been kidnapped and strangled. Rebus – 41-year-old drinker, ex-soldier, failed husband, absentee father, Christian, annual rereader of Crime and Punishment – begins receiving a series of cryptic notes. The first few ...”

“... buildings are gone and so are the laughing children and the shoppers. This is the beginning of the North Peckham Estate. From its foothills of modern maisonettes and bungalows, the estate rises to a series of peaks in the centre consisting of 1960s concrete blocks five storeys high. On my way to Peckham, I’d gone past an estate near Elephant and Castle. I ...”

“... because Iran would retaliate. The next logical step for Iran would be to follow the example set by North Korea three years ago: withdraw from the NPT and expel the IAEA inspectors. That would lead to a more dangerous situation, as it would then be difficult to constrain Iran without military action. The Europeans’ view is that it is better to keep Iran ...”

“... achievements as a general trade publisher rank him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of genius is ...”

“... much more than the boundaries of good taste, it would be difficult to tell from The Farthest North of Humanness. The philistine reaction to flagellation and sexual experiment was exactly what Grainger wanted, of course, and the reponse to this monster volume of letters, assisted by some unintentionally comic editing, is likely to be one that would have ...”

“... Coast, the family Hillman Minx would head not towards a nearby Channel port but westwards, or north-westwards, or just plain north. In perverse flight from the sunlit sandy beaches of Bournemouth – which attracted mere holidaymakers, the kind who were starting to take package trips to Benidorm instead – we, like the ...”

“... unaided by experiment or instruments, could arrive at exact knowledge. Some two centuries later, John Herschel, in his textbook, Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1831), warned the novice that the human sense apparatus was too crude and subjective an instrument to discover anything of scientific moment. The senses, he argued, must be ...”

“... of assuming an audience ‘both universal and homogeneous’. The pamphlet was quoted recently by John Gross in an afterword to a new edition of his book The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters.* Gross assumed a combative stance, calling his piece ‘the man of letters in a closed shop’, and speaking of the ‘cold horror’ that filled him when he ...”