“... reality by citing evidence to show that half of England was no longer wildwood at the start of the Iron Age. By 7500 BC, Mesolithic hunters were burning forest to allow meadows to flourish in which their quarry could herd and browse. By 3500 BC, Neolithic people were clearing large areas to make room for their sacred stone circles – and the estimated numbers ...”

“... survival, perhaps doomed to be bred out in the long run as savages became civilised, rather like Richard Dawkins’s view of the religion meme? Is that the implication? If so, this is precisely the opposite of the Christian view, especially in the Middle Ages, that shedding tears was the sign of an advanced soul, one which had been pierced by God. This ...”

“... warped each stalk. The tractor body was fleeced with foam and I, rocked back and forth on the iron seat shaped like a woman’s hips, alone in nature, as hidden under the glaring sky as at midnight, excited by destruction, weightless, discovered in myself a swelling which I idly permitted to stand, thinking of Peggy. My wife is a field. The equation is ...”

“... often through quatrain-by-quatrain explication. Now, a vigorous, wry, alert new translation by Richard Sieburth offers English readers the experience of reading them steadily and sequentially, rather than piecemeal, and with the original French on facing pages, making it possible to read the prophecies as acts of writing rather than riddles. Nostradamus ...”

“... deadpan account of the tracking and capture of Eichmann in The House on Garibaldi Street; Richard Deacon, The Israeli Secret Service, which tells the story, among others, of Wolfgang Lotz, the Israeli spy with unassailably Aryan looks who infiltrated Egyptian government circles to get plans for rocket sites and the names of German technicians: a story ...”

“... bloody escapes; middle-class students planted bombs and robbed banks. In August that year, Richard Nixon took a break from a four-day conference on crime control to address reporters. His subject was the spell that outlaw behaviour had apparently cast on the youth of America. In a characteristically sideways rhetorical manoeuvre, he began with a ...”

“... Cambridge. On parade (on King’s Parade in fact) just after ten, where the calming presence of Richard Lloyd Morgan, the chaplain of King’s, waits to shepherd me to the Senior Common Room. It’s already crowded with dons, some, since it’s the university sermon, presumably heads of houses.* I manage to avoid a chat by settling into a corner to con my ...”

“... Dealer. The man who started this frivolous auction was William Safire, former speechwriter to Richard Nixon and now columnist for the New York Times. He it was who, during the dismal days of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, came up with ‘Koreagate’, ‘Peanutgate’, ‘Billygate’ and – his own favourite, concerning some fiddle of government expenses ...”

“... thought was the recovery position. Brooks told him that Lawrence had been hit on the head with an iron bar. The police officers seem to have agreed that in the case of a serious head injury they should wait for the paramedics to arrive. They later claimed not to have seen Lawrence’s blood on the pavement. Doreen Lawrence believes that they failed to give ...”

“... It was Richard Crossman who described secrecy as ‘the British disease’. As with other alleged vices anglais – strikes, spanking and sodomy spring to mind – this seems on the surface to be unfair. Other societies have undoubtedly been as secretive. Soviet Russia, for example: I don’t suppose it was any easier to see your medical records there than it is here ...”

“... violent. ‘See stars, Mummy,’ Sandro says before hitting Sophia over the head with an iron bar. It is this intertwining of fact and fiction, realism and surrealism, that gives Comyns’s work its power. Six of her nine novels are first-person narratives, the voice always childlike in its directness. In her lifetime this prompted comparisons with ...”

“... the original committal and was blunt about it: ‘Nothing on earth will do Ivor any good till by Iron Discipline he has had his natural obstinacy and stubbornness broken down.’ To be fair to Ronald and others, Gurney (at least from the age of ten) had always been a misfit in an unmusical family of minimal education whose business was tailoring. Winning a ...”

“... appeared the previous summer. Several of its most striking poems grew from a fascination with the Iron Age bodies that had been exhumed from the peat bogs of Northern Europe: the subject became, as he later recollected, ‘a completely instinctive obsessional thing’. In 1969 Faber published The Bog People, the English translation of a book by the Danish ...”

“... evidence linking him to war crimes. Despite the advanced state of the German prosecution, Richard Goldstone, who had recently been given leave from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to head the Prosecutor’s office in The Hague, was determined that the Tribunal should not let the only current case of an alleged war criminal pass ...”

“... Ovid tells us that in the golden age man was content to remain on his own land, but that with the iron age came the felling of trees, the building of ships, the building of empire; one of the many respects in which the Metamorphoses is a rebuke to that great apologia for empire, Virgil’s Aeneid, is its anthropomorphic sympathy for trees. Give a tree a human ...”