“... warts and all. To do otherwise would leave our history and future diminished.’ A month later, Oliver Dowden, then culture secretary and now co-chair of the Conservative Party, made a similar point: ‘Proud and confident nations face their past squarely; they do not seek to run from or airbrush the history upon which they are founded … Purging ...”

“... medium, sound. There is just one easy place to go to find out about all of these things at once: Oliver Sacks’s new book of three essays. Like all his writing, the essays are engaging, funny, informed, humane and speculative. One, a brilliant piece of journalism, describes the 1988 revolution – the word used by every deaf person I know – at Gallaudet ...”

“... it would have been just as effective. Getting On is an account of a middle-aged Labour MP, George Oliver, so self-absorbed that he remains blind to the fact that his wife is having an affair with the handyman, his mother-in-law is dying, his son is getting ready to leave home, his best friend thinks him a fool and that to everyone who comes into contact with ...”

“... safe seat out of Labour’s grip. The defeat, according to a contemporary Nationalist observer, Oliver Brown, sent a shiver along the Labour benches ‘looking for a spine to run up’. The Scottish Labour vote was managed at this point by Willie Ross, who was secretary of state for Scotland between 1964 and 1970, and again from 1974 until the retirement of ...”

“... Harold Macmillan, Harry Crookshank, Oliver Lyttelton and Bobbety Cranborne all arrived at Eton in 1906, the first two from the affluent middle class and the other two from aristocratic families. Lyttelton went on to Cambridge and the others to Oxford, but they all served in the Grenadier Guards in 1914-18, and all four entered Churchill’s cabinet during the Second World War ...”

“... a work that, according to Howe, gave rise to ‘the only literary-mythological form indigenous to North America … a microcosm of colonial imperialist history and a prophecy of our contemporary repudiation of alterity, anonymity, darkness’.And yet one wouldn’t say that Howe programmatically divides the colonists into the powerful and the ...”

“... are their descriptions of the invasion. Most of them were either embedded with the troops rolling north – Oliver Poole, David Zucchino, or Evan Wright of Rolling Stone, who wrote Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War2 – or in Baghdad waiting for the ...”

“... explained? Above all, how were they managed? A fine start in this historical quest was made for North America a few years back with James Trent’s Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States. Historians in this country, too, have been snorkelling in the archives, and the first fruits of their hunt are now presented in ...”

“... He had been a Whiteboy, one of the many bands of agrarian rebels who lurked in the mountains of north Cork and came down to raid the towns. There was a story that on one occasion in his youth he was taken and nearly ition carried on by his descendants; and a keen rider to hounds, which did not mean the family were considered to be of the gentry class: in ...”

“... when the Sunday Correspondent invited me to be its American contributor, Black, or someone with a North American accent calling himself Conrad Black, was on the telephone within hours of my being gazetted, barking that I was a disgrace to the profession and should not be employed. Indeed he made the very damaging accusation that I was ‘a mental case’. A ...”

“... The intention was to find a practical means of honouring his work. I was taken to a tiny North London council flat, and there sitting in the middle of its cramped living-room, I encountered a very ancient and frail-looking man, striking mainly for the large and antique ear-trumpet which he applied when straining to catch remarks addressed to him. I ...”

“... in 1603: Scotland perhaps illustrates the proposition that there was such a thing as a ‘North Sea economy’. At a time when waterborne trade was so conspicuously easier than land-borne trade, this is probably what should have been expected. The thought prompts the reflection that the improvements in road transport characteristic of the 17th century ...”

“... a wet Friday morning and we have come over on the hovercraft and are driving through St Omer and north to Zillebeke, a village south-east of Ypres, or, since we have now crossed the Belgian frontier, Ieper. The guidebook says there were three battles at Ypres. The first, in 1914, ended in stalemate and marked the beginning of trench warfare. The second, in ...”

“... first indication that the Telegraph is preparing to turn its attention to the Tories. First up, Oliver Letwin, who apparently claimed £2000 to install a drainage pipe under his tennis court. As the BBC’s Nick Robinson remarked, ‘the political class has lost control of this story. No one knows where it’s going.’ 11 May. To Westminster. Entire place ...”

“... Oliver Craske​ begins his biography of Ravi Shankar by telling an Indian parable. A blind man, stroking an elephant’s trunk, thinks he is holding a snake. Another blind man, running his hands along the animal’s leg, assumes he is touching a tree trunk; a third mistakes its tail for a rope. People’s response to Indian classical music is the same, Shankar told a press conference in London in 1966 ...”