“... In June of this year Tony Benn took part in a radio discussion on the working of Parliament, together with John Biffen and Roy (Lord) Jenkins. Asked by the chairman, Peter Hennessy, if he did not think that the Lords now functioned as a ‘focus of opposition’, Benn responded that it was, instead, ‘part of an attack on democracy ...”

“... With great pride and symbolism, he describes introducing his own son, Hilary, to the House in June 1999, just as his father had introduced him in 1950, and just as his grandfather, John Benn, had introduced William Wedgwood Benn in 1906. Such anecdotes make this the most personal and moving of Benn’s diaries to date. In political terms, however, this is ...”

“... however inadequate, as the last great military commander of the British Empire. ‘Wavell’s star rose high at an early stage of the war,’ his friend Basil Liddell Hart wrote. ‘The glow was the more brilliant because of the darkness of the sky.’ He entered the army in 1900, aged 17 and straight from school. Commissioned a year later, he was sent to ...”

“... one of my Chinese students described a Westerner’s day, he was succinct: his Western businessman rose at six o’clock to take his two snakes for an airing in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes; they stopped at a pub en route, emerged blind-drunk, and crashed the car into a scholartree. Sarah Lubman recently explained in the Washington Post that Chinese students ...”

“... riding in a coach, along with Lambert, to Westminster. During the rest of the 1650s, governments rose and tumbled, further constitutions were written and abandoned, and there seemed to be more opinions, as one contemporary complaint had it, than there were faces.Until recently,​trade publishers have avoided England’s republic – as too ...”

“... and binding machinery that solved the nagging labour shortage in the Midwest. Grain imports rose from only 2 per cent of Britain’s total supply in the 1830s to 45 per cent in the 1880s (65 per cent for wheat) and went on rising remorselessly. Already by 1900, wheatfields covered only half the acreage of 1872. The First World War and German U-boats ...”

“... a flat-bed printing press employing reusable type (see Charley Seavey’s letter to the LRB, 1 June) – but that doesn’t really matter for the purposes of the novel, the dynamic of which is dependent on the tension between his flawed character and his role as the founding genius of modernity. But the tension isn’t there, regardless of doubts about the ...”

“... As Yiannis Boutaris, the city’s charismatic mayor, approached the podium twenty young people rose from their seats chanting slogans. It was hard to read the black banner they tried to unfurl. The letters ‘YFANET’ meant nothing to me, but ‘No to the State’ provided a clue. Mainstream politics might be in retreat in Greece but anarchism is alive ...”

“... That was in November 2014. At that point there wasn’t much to see – until it rained and steam rose from the edge of the fourth fairway, next to the riverbank. By the end of the year, the fire was visible: smoke plumed from cracks in the earth and tree roots began to catch alight. And when the smoke blew across the fairways towards the terraced houses of ...”

“... other favourite hobby. Guest lists meant something then. The novelist William Styron and his wife, Rose (respected worldwide as a human rights activist), had drawing power as party hosts, the cultural cachet to net composers, playwrights, directors, ratfink fabulists and a former president’s daughter to toast the holidays and air out their egos. Such dos ...”

“... his lectern.The message worked well (some said too well) and Johnson’s own satisfaction ratings rose sharply after he was admitted to hospital with Covid-19. In mid-April, two-thirds of respondents said they were confident the government would provide accurate information about the pandemic. But public trust soon declined. By the start of ...”

“... The last time was in Paris when we were having supper at Brasserie Bofinger. Bacon and his party rose to leave, whereupon all the waiters gathered in the window to watch the great man depart – something I could never imagine happening in London.14 February. Watch the beginning of A Matter of Life and Death on BBC2, where David Niven, having survived his ...”

“... of bells, and the village smoke ascends like incense of immemorial tranquillity. And at the rose-grown porch of some discreet little house a girl in a print-dress is waiting, waiting for the returning footsteps along the twilight lane, while the last blackbird warbles from the may-tree. Two years previously Ernest Rhys had put out an anthology for ...”

“... de Grouchy’s classic error of engaging the Prussian rearguard at Wavre on the critical day, 18 June 1815, although he and his 33,000 French soldiers could have reached Waterloo in good time: he heard the gunfire, yet persisted in his own separate fight, thus violating Napoleon’s very first rule of concentrating all available forces at all costs for the ...”

“... VIII announced his intention to honour the marriage treaty and marry his brother’s widow. On 11 June 1509, in a quiet wedding ceremony at Greenwich, Catherine became queen of England. Despite the difference in their ages – Henry had been a mischievous page at Catherine’s first wedding – the auguries for the marriage were good. The royal couple from ...”