“... old as Marcuse’s 1937 essay on ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’ and as contemporary as David Lloyd and Paul Thomas’s 1998 Culture and the State – that such a culture, when it is officially sponsored by even the most benevolent and enlightened state, may easily serve to maintain a very non-utopian status quo. If there is an embarrassing absence ...”

“... hairdresser trying to make a living in 1915 offer as vital an insight into the pulse of history as Owen or Sassoon’s poetry from the Front. Long is a businessman wishing to share his years of experience with others of his trade. There is always satisfaction in discovering the details of specialist worlds, and the quotidian life of the hairdresser expands ...”

“... order of service at weddings. Most people of a certain age could recite a sonnet or two by Wilfred Owen, or Keats, or Shakespeare. How did this half-page filler, a half-pint form of a mere 14 lines, come to be so successful? From a reader’s point of view the answer is obvious. A sonnet is short enough not to get lost in but long enough to encompass at least ...”

“... meetings: by 1838, they could not even be kept out of the zoological section, where Richard Owen ‘modified the reproductive part’ of an address on marsupials ‘as delicately as possible’. By dissecting the chronicle of events thematically, the authors tease out the various sinews which they weave into a coherent interpretation of a historical ...”

“... the early Twenties. Under cover of darkness, Nixon led a squad of masked policemen to the home of Owen McMahon, a prominent Catholic publican in North Belfast. They broke down the front door using a sledgehammer, entered, roused the family from their beds, gathered the male members, including an 11-year-old boy, in the front parlour, allowed a few minutes for ...”

“... undertaken by Donald Mitchell in his interview with Benjamin Britten conducted at the time of Owen Wingrave’s composition. Small adjustments even here, I gather, were made. But the tiniest adjustment, strictly speaking, disqualifies a transcript from verbatim status, and obliges the transcriber to form a notion of optimum veracity. This being so, one ...”

“... friends. But there is a further story that is to link all the others. Fanny’s grandmother, Nana Owen, chances upon the diaries that her own father, Oswald Fish, had kept in the 1880s and 1890s. They show poor Fish, a church architect and designer of ornamental metal-work, torn between the claims of art, of social position, of family life and of sexual ...”

“... us watching at home was England v. Argentina in the 1998 World Cup – the match in which Michael Owen scored that goal and David Beckham was shown that effigy-birthing red card. It was at McDonald’s that I was introduced to tactical discourse and talk of transfer windows; to the idea that a player being sold by a club ...”

“... light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had broken at long last and this was the first male role I was ...”

“... was still, de jure, a single nation. In 1949, envisaging the possibility of a ‘civil war’, Owen Lattimore wrote: ‘America, which has in China complained of the bad luck of having inherited the Kuomintang through no fault of its own, has in Korea manufactured its own Kuomintang. To support our proclaimed policy of world-wide opposition to police ...”

“... for military staffs to prepare war plans, or for governments to hint at the use of military force. David Spring shows that Russian leaders knew they had good political, financial, military and social reasons to avoid war, and that their hesitant moves towards army mobilisation were intended only to underscore a firm diplomatic stand, and to deter. The French ...”

“... Moore about sketching people in London air-raid shelters. Facts, though, aren’t everything, as David Cecil argued early in 1941, in an article lamenting the propagandist pressures being brought to bear on artists. Prisoners of war were commended for escaping, he pointed out. Why shouldn’t writers be escapists, too? This was itself a shocking thing to ...”

“... Philip did not look like ‘the most potent monarch of Christendom’, as the 17th-century writer Owen Feltham described him. But his was the empire on which the sun never set. After the Spanish annexation of Portugal in 1580, a celebratory medal declared: ‘non sufficit orbis’ (‘the world is not enough’). Parker, whose excellent biography of ...”

“... Sands had secured election to the House of Commons, and after his death the Sinn Féin member Owen Carron won the resultant by-election with an increased majority. (Naturally, the British authorities had rushed legislation through to stop other prisoners following Sands’s lead.) Immediately after Carron’s victory, Provisional Sinn Féin announced its ...”