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“... David Bindman does not think that Hogarth was joking when he gave one of his contemporaries, John Nichols, a comic demonstration of minimalism: it took the form of a diagram composed of three lines and he claimed that it contained his memory of ‘a Sergeant with his pike going into an Ale House, and his Dog following ...”

“... prosecution case against Edgar A. Poe looks a strong one. Taken in by the Richmond tobacco broker John Allan when left orphaned at the age of two by the death of his actress mother Eliza, brought up as a member of the family and sent to the University of Virginia, he responded by running up gambling debts and drinking, so that he left after a ...”

“... as MI5, continued to expand even after the end of the Cold War, and by 1992, when Stella Rimington took over, it had more than 2300 staff. The volume of material circulated by GCHQ, the signals intelligence agency, and by SIS, the overseas intelligence service, also ensures them a significant place in government. In 1995, ...”

“... diminished. In Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823), a pivotal Supreme Court decision, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that Indians had a ‘right of occupancy’, but were not full owners of their land as whites understood it. Nonetheless, to the end of the 19th century, even as the federal government forcibly expelled Indians from the eastern half of the ...”

“... preaching in Chitterne, the next village. His son, another Henry, my father’s grandfather, took their trade – bricklaying – and their religion south to Portsmouth. Shrewton is halfway between Salisbury and Devizes, on the old road between London and Warminster, a position that made it less dependent on the sheep and corn farming from which most ...”

“... Canaletto left elegant depictions of its Round Pond, from where elm pipes and the force of gravity took water to much of Central London. Nowadays, the New River flows into the great Ring Main, a kind of H2O M25. The supply began with individual enterprise when, around 1600, Edmund Colthurst, an Elizabethan man of parts, sought royal approval of his plans. By ...”

“... gnomically (but it’s the truth), ‘Beckmann was time.’ He was successful early, painting John Martin-like catastrophes on a huge scale: visionary, awful, sandy things. The first monograph on him appeared before the First World War, when he was still in his twenties. In the war, he was an ambulance man on the Western Front, before suffering a complete ...”

“... English nobility in the later 14th century, if only because in the 15th century religion led Sir John Fastolf to beaueath most of his war booty to Magdalen College. With Braudel on ‘The Rejection of the Reformation in France’ we are getting on. As a parting thought, Braudel throws in the suggestion that the Reformation halted wherever it ran into the ...”

“... that occurs, in analysing his character, is to discover by what depravity of intellect he took delight in revolving ideas from which almost every other mind shrinks with disgust.’ Sixty years after Johnson, Thackeray still revolved the same motif. As for the moral of Gulliver’s Travels, he said: ‘I think it ...”

“... to finish. This was partly because of uncertainty, but it was also because much of the labour took place in the periods between mark-making. Often he would sit on one of the chairs arranged around the studio, making mistakes in his head so as to avoid making them in the work. He also spent a great deal of time in his studio reading Agatha Christie novels ...”

“... which are often bedlam. High-minded modernist ideas and aspirations may have driven Colin St John Wilson to design his building as he did, but it’s the unruliness of some who go there that makes it appealingly lived in. Study describes what goes on inside, obviously – except, and equally obviously, when it doesn’t – but in its outward aspects the ...”

“... practice, streamlining the Mass and permitting its celebration in languages other than Latin. John XXIII, the pope who initiated the council in 1962, described it as an aggiornamento, a ‘bringing up to date’, an attempt to ‘throw open the windows of the church and let the fresh air of the Spirit blow through’.Much church politics over the last few ...”

“... Nessie Dunsmuir. She seems to have borne their hardship with remarkable fortitude, but it clearly took its toll on them both: ‘Living mainly on bread and potatoes and some fish and mussels and not having enough paraffin for cooking got us down and a wee bit undernourished,’ Graham reported to a friend at one point. Hard liquor was a large part of the hard ...”

“... Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he argues, that we find ‘the slumbering Radicalism’ which was preserved through the 18th century, and broke out again and again in the 19th. Bunyan was born in a cottage on the edge of Elstow, a village near Bedford, in November 1628. His father ...”

“... every week. In his first season, 1960, D’Oliveira headed Sobers in the batting averages and took 70 wickets; the next season Sobers had the better batting average but D’Oliveira outscored him – and Sobers was the best all-round cricketer there has ever been. What is most touching, and awful, in Time to Declare – D’Oliveira tells it unwincingly ...”