“... in 1885. The Football League, the first in the world, was formed in 1888 by 12 clubs, six from the North-West, six from the Midlands, principally to provide the new professional clubs with regular fixtures, so that they could plan their budgets. That is still the game’s structure today: the leagues are club competitions, and the FA is the overall governing ...”

“... with the publication in 2003 of its magisterial sixth volume, written by the general editor, John Baker, and covering the years 1483-1558. It then went back to the beginning, with R.H. Helmholz’s opening volume on early canon law. The rest was silence, until in 2010 the series sailed suddenly and magnificently into port without any of the remaining ...”

“... architects is essentially a list (Meades likes lists) of refined barbarians. The pantheon contains John Vanbrugh, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, S.S. Teulon, William Butterfield, Frederick Pilkington, Dominikus and Gottfried Böhm, Claude Parent, Rodney Gordon, Richard Rogers (in his Gothic moods), Zaha Hadid. Sometimes, as with the Communist emulator of the style of ...”

“... a Bothy Nicht at the Imperial Hotel in Aberdeen where he heard the ballad singing and stories of John Strachan, an Aberdeenshire farmer who became one of his most important sources. In ‘Journey to a Kingdom’, an unpublished poem written in 1938, Henderson leaves no doubt that these northern excursions were conscious acts of homecoming. In the summer of ...”

“... concludes his introduction to All What Jazz (1970), a collection of mainly unimpressed reviews of John Coltrane, Miles Davis et al that initially appeared in the Telegraph. ‘Sometimes I imagine them,’ he muses of the readers of his monthly column,sullen fleshy inarticulate men, stockbrokers, sellers of goods, living in thirty-year-old detached houses ...”

“... the fleet, and went to and from their work in fleets of buses and special trains. Many had come north from the Royal Navy’s heartland in Southern England: Chatham, Portsmouth, Devonport. A whole town had been built to accommodate them: Rosyth Garden City. Many if not most of my relations worked at the dockyard – Rosyth was a handy provider of employment ...”

“... from the appearance of the new Oxford Middleton. Even as the blurb declares that Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino’s monumental collection is ‘based on the award-winning design of the Oxford Shakespeare’, the binding and dust jacket defiantly proclaim its difference from that distinguished model. The Shakespeare was bound in the press’s traditional ...”

“... do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters. The US form of government ...”

“... down the steps to catch the first hints of the river and the Crossness Pumping Station, I headed north. My compass was shaken, but my hunch that the Elizabeth Line’s southern terminal would be the portal to a major development rethink was confirmed. The immediate shopping precinct was in mourning. It was shuttered, lost. K’S SPICE AFRICAN EXPRESS was ...”

“... As dozens​ of lagoons of pig waste overflow in North Carolina, President Trump says that Hurricane Florence is ‘one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water’. (In North Carolina 9.7 million pigs produce ten billion gallons of manure a year.)*President Trump says: ‘I hope to be able to put this up as one of my crowning achievements that I was able to expose something that is truly a cancer in our country ...”

“... or New Hampshire, which are ‘different’. I stifled the impulse to say that we were from the North and that the Confederacy was the enemy in the war we’d won, or that someone who wore the symbol of American white supremacy out in public perhaps deserved to ‘get jumped’. Though I’d read about Trump supporters shouting ‘Sieg heil!’ at his ...”

“... dark windows. Farrell’s folly seemed to be twinned with the other publishing conglomerate on the north side of the river: Random House. Marks modestly described his book as undernourished fiction, fiction buried beneath an excess of facts. It’s the first reflex of the con man, the bullshitter, to lay down a smokescreen of names, dates, addresses. Bore the ...”

“... after 1500 have been sent to the Musée National de la Renaissance at the Château d’Écouen, north of Paris. Such drastic deaccessioning would have been disruptive for many museums, but at Cluny, where the va et vient of objects has been the norm, it has created more space and clarity for what remains. The collection is itself the product of centuries of ...”

“... was a formal dinner in Chapultepec Castle hosted by the Mexican president, Porfirio Díaz, in 1889.North America was suffering from ‘Spanish fever’. The obsession with the Hispanic had begun to incubate in the 1870s, slowly overcoming the deeply entrenched myth of the Black Legend, which characterised Spain as a country of cruel and unenlightened Catholic ...”

“... me in the East He fucked me in the West He fucked me South my cock in his mouth he fucked me North No sperm shot forth The dismaying thing about such verses as this one from ‘Love comes’ is the inadequacy of the language, the idea that a serious poem could ever be written in these terms. Ginsberg once rebuked the poet W.S. Merwin because, when ...”