“... King Solomon’s Mines because it’s set in ‘the Manica country’, a province a few hundred miles east of Harare. It seemed run of the mill at the time, much like the other books in the library: it was tightly plotted, suspense-driven, lavishly sexist and racist. In fact, though it is often read as a children’s book, it isn’t; nor is it run of the ...”

“... making ambitious claims for the importance of the work and explaining his choice of title. Next, Richard Shone, an associate editor of the Burlington Magazine, perhaps best known for his scholarly work on the Bloomsbury Group, gives a detailed chronicle of the careers of the artists, whom he describes as loosely ‘entwined’ in a single history. He sees ...”

“... In an area of dairy pasture a few miles from Coventry, there is a bench formed from one half of a large clinker-built rowing boat sticking vertically out of the ground, with a sturdy wooden seat placed within the hull so that it is sheltered as if by an arbour. There is no water in sight except a definitely non-navigable stream ...”

“... the headquarters of the American military training mission at La Esperanza sugar mill, some forty miles outside the eastern oil town of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. (Granada Television had enlisted me to act as Brian Moser’s consultant on a World in Action documentary.) At La Esperanza, we found the commander, Major Ralph ‘Pappy’ Shelton, a Korean ...”

“... in Latin. But I continued construing as far as the Death of Dido. Thirty years before, the late Richard Martineau, D.P. Simpson or Oliver Hunkin would have made sure that every boy in his class understood what was being taught. As a 12-year-old who hadn’t done Greek at his prep school, I vividly remember the trouble taken by the late L.S. Bethell to allow ...”

“... response, Edward III set a cap on earnings to protect the nobility. His successor, the 14-year-old Richard II, or whoever was really in charge, went further, introducing a poll tax to pay for the ongoing skirmishes with France. In 1381, a tax collector went to Fobbing in Essex to demand a silver groat from each inhabitant, and was chased away by an angry ...”

“... Victorian geology, Murchison worked fast: afraid of being pre-empted, he raced for thousands of miles across the countryside on a tarantass drawn by six horses. By the standards of late 20th-century research, his haste meant that the Permian system’s upper limits were poorly defined, although scientists had soon filled in some of the missing bits. The ...”

“... The Thames underwrites a narrative of royal escapes, murdered princelings, futile rebellion. Richard II is rowed downstream to confront Wat Tyler and his peasant army. Unable to call on anything as formidable as the Metropolitan Police’s Territorial Support Group, the boy king refuses to step ashore. ‘Rough, rude men’ had been sent ‘all over the ...”

“... But the same is true of manuscripts.Cotton may not have known what he had. His librarian, Richard James, labelled the manuscript: ‘Vetus poema Anglicanum in quo sub insomnii figmento multa ad religionem et mores spectantia explicantur’ (a poem in old English explaining many religious and moral topics using the figure of the dream). It was not ...”

“... drinking coffee, but when Dames didn’t show, Maharaj left. He said that many people had seen him miles away from the hotel at the time of the murder, though none of them had been called as a witness. He had never asked Geddes for an alibi. He didn’t know why Butler was lying. He had no idea who killed the Moo Youngs. The defence counsel told the judge that ...”

“... the city’s deadly riots in 1965 and 1992; the formative years spent in southern California by Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and the region’s postwar conservative movement, which greatly influenced their presidencies; and last year’s protests over policing and racism, which were among the largest in the US. The rest of the time, you might ...”

“... over the course of the 16th century. Among those who migrated from Stratford was a tanner’s son, Richard Field, a fellow pupil of Shakespeare’s at the local grammar school. He left in 1580, at the age of 18, to serve as an apprentice to a French immigrant printer in the Blackfriars, Thomas Vautrollier. In her essay on Field, Carol Chillington Rutter ...”

“... modern historiography. It is this ensemble, stretching across a millennium and round thousands of miles of coastline, that Richard Fletcher has taken as his subject in The Conversion of Europe. What concerns him is not the conversion of this or that people but all medieval conversions (including conversions between ...”

“... the plays (like those of Athens) constituted a civic festival designed to draw in audiences from miles around. It must be probable that the young Shakespeare saw them at least once, maybe several times; and there is every reason to imagine that they made a deeper impression on him than on the old man in Westmorland. They would have provided not just a ...”

“... celebrity, palindrome enthusiast (‘Lewd did I live, & evil I did dwel’) – sailed forty miles down the Thames to Queenborough on the Isle of Sheppey in a boat made from brown paper. He fashioned oars from dried fishes tied to sticks, and strapped inflated animal bladders to the sides of the boat to help it float. Taylor was not a shy man. His list ...”