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“... in the postwar years. By far the greatest military figure wartime Britain produced was Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, the victor of Taranto and Cape Matapan, whose remit it was, as commander in chief of the Mediterranean theatre, to protect the British army in North Africa. Yet there is no mention of Montgomery in Cunningham’s autobiography, A Sailor’s ...”

“... little sign of a strategy to deal with it. The same media, after all, made short work of Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. Whatever its shortcomings, for the vast majority of the electorate the media is where politics happens, and where political judgments are made; headlines, real and fake, circulate at light-speed through social media, detached from context ...”

“... something bobbing in the water. The dead man was 30; 5 feet 8 inches tall, slightly built, with brown eyes and dark-brown collar-length hair. He was cleanshaven, with irregular teeth which were otherwise in fairly good nick. He had no tattoos. His face and upper body were discoloured and bloated, but he was nowhere near ...”

“... the ‘crappy brainwaves’ of Spurs chairman Irving Scholar and the ‘uncolourful speech’ of Andrew Motion, putting me immediately in mind of the ‘brown teapot’ in his Arvon Prize-winning poem of 1990, ‘A Letter’. This lapidary gift is served, perversely and surprisingly, by wonderful timing. On the ...”

“... is) a wonderful grandstand. The land feels eager to be eroded all over New Zealand. Charles Andrew Cotton, a local pioneer of geomorphology could illustrate most generalities of what erosion does to landforms with native examples. All my New Zealand years I lived at 13 Pitt Street with my parents and sisters. (As you walk down, the odd numbers are on ...”

“... from counter-jihadist websites, 2083 was posted online on the day of the attacks under the name ‘Andrew Berwick’, one of Breivik’s several aliases. The signs of Europe’s creeping Islamisation were everywhere, he argued, from Bosnian independence to the spread of mosques in Oslo. Muslim men were having their way with European women, while declaring ...”

“... the patronage of his CP father and predecessor, began as a shop-stewards’ convenor at Firth Brown Tools at the age of 24, then modulated into a Kinnockite MP and, since 1997, government minister. South Wales, where everything turned on the pit lodge and the Miners’ Federation (‘The Fed’), and Sheffield, where everything turned on the AEU District ...”

“... side by side, high officials of MI5 and MI6, sea lords, permanent under-secretaries, Lord George-Brown, chiefs of the air staff, nuclear scientists, Lord Wigg and others, stand patiently leaking in the public interest. One can only admire their resolute attention to these distasteful duties.’ Pincher describes the comparison as ‘my most cherished ...”

“... of a second-century Greek original – was tendentious, to say the least. An Egyptologist at Brown University, Leo Depuydt, found a ‘colossal double blunder’ in the Coptic grammar. As a younger man, Depuydt had once warned the Oxford journal Discussions in Egyptology not to publish a grammatically flawed version of a Gnostic text. They went ahead ...”

“... good on his threat, shooting Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC.Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, was a fierce racist who militantly opposed giving African Americans an equal legal status to whites. He supported the ending of slavery but wanted blacks to be confined to a subordinate caste. That is one of the reasons Radicals in the Republican ...”

“... at a washstand with ewers and professing mystification as to its function. A comic book about the Brown Family at the Crystal Palace showed Cannibal Islanders in native dress sitting opposite the family at table and asking greedily how much they wanted for little Johnny, under a sign saying ‘Soup à la Hottentot’. A spoof report on a visit to the ...”

“... governor of Virginia; on 19 January, a Republican who describes himself as independent, Scott Brown, won Ted Kennedy’s senate seat in Massachusetts. The scale of these victories made them particularly ominous. McDonnell took 59 per cent of the votes and Brown 52 per cent, in states where Obama a year earlier had ...”

“... Blair’s latest consensus hair policy, Lord Archer’s ironic, pre-penitentiary crop, the way Andrew Motion carries off his loden coat as he swirls between taxi and station platform. Julian Barnes’s novels are depilated at source, fat-free. Frisking them for a Moorcockian digression, a set of cellulite-heavy parentheses, would be like checking a tub of ...”

“... and skill at organising forced them into the public consciousness. From 1954, when the NAACP took Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education to the Supreme Court and won its judgment that state education could not be ‘equal’ if it was also ‘separate’, through a decade of Martin Luther King’s non-violent marches, boycotts and sit-ins against Southern ...”

“... to Blair and the new yuppie style. Actually, Labour would have won crushingly under Cook or Brown in 1997. And, of course, whatever the New Labour style, Labour still rests on the votes of the poorer half of the population, with certain immanent consequences that Blair is bound to discover. But very few politicians are at all good at understanding their ...”