“... that his job was being lined up for one of New Labour’s rising stars such as Jack Straw or Peter Mandelson, Cook may indeed have been thinking hard about escape routes to the European Commission or the Scottish Parliament, but that doesn’t mean he was already a busted flush. He did, after all, survive another five years – and when he finally left ...”

“... and ‘rather restless’ horde had come to listen to him preach. Amid the commotion he had to read out a passage from the Gospels twice, ‘for my voice is such that it will only carry in a great silence.’ In the 840s, two men dressed as monks arrived at the church of St Bénigne in Dijon with bones they claimed were relics. (Of which saint they ...”

“... often willing to experiment with highly volatile social materials.’ So the bishops became, in Peter Brown’s striking phrase, impresarios of the sacred. They took the bodies of the saints from their shrines outside the cities, and placed them under the altars of their cathedrals. Rather than a trigger for conflicting pieties, the saint became a centre of ...”

“... an influence on him in his less realist modes); the encounters with bears and goblins in Lapland read like something out of a Scandinavian folk tale. Munthe built his house and his memoir in similar ways, accumulating material from disparate sources – he brought a red granite sphinx from Egypt to glare out over the Bay of Naples, and dredged up from the ...”

“... that time still with blondish hair and the face yet to go under the harrow.I don’t think I’d read much of his poetry or would have understood it if I had, but when Auden gave his inaugural lecture as professor of poetry the following year I dutifully went along, knowing, though not quite why, that he was some sort of celebrity. At that time I still ...”

“... age group and because younger women have denser breast tissue, which makes mammograms harder to read.) In a mammogram the contrast is between fat, which is more or less transparent to X-rays, and other tissues, which appear either as overlapping fibrous strands or as a dense cloud. These form a complex background against which the signs of cancer must be ...”

“... that chapter 29 of Magna Carta rose to near scriptural status: ‘No freeman [for which now read person] shall be … exiled, or any other wise destroyed … but by lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.’ Baker points out the potential relevance of this still-extant provision to the Chagos islanders’ litigation, in which it formed ...”

“... and found on the phone of Barbara Allison, then Scottish Government director of communications, read: ‘We have lost the battle but we will win the war.’ Two messages from the SNP chief executive, Peter Murrell (who is married to Sturgeon), sent the day after Salmond was first charged, were leaked to the Westminster MP ...”

“... touching picture ... of an England now lost’. The story will be a familiar one to those who have read his published diaries. In 1936, Lees-Milne joined the National Trust as one of its staff of four. Since its inception in 1895, the Trust had interpreted its mission as it is currently once again beginning to do, concentrating on purchasing particular ...”

“... In the morning Frederick would walk to the Royal Torbay Yacht Club, drink a glass of sherry, read the newspapers and walk home for luncheon. In the afternoon he would walk back to the club and weigh himself. He died in 1901, leaving the family financially embarrassed. Clara preserved his last letter, the order of service from his funeral, some beech ...”

“... near the hearth, handy for pulling a volume out and leaning against the mantelpiece while he read a soulful passage’), and Lamming is more interested in old Lawson’s relationship with two women, his housekeeper and the intruding Moira Gelling. Of the two, Gelling is supposed to be the more intriguing, a spoilt middle-aged pussycat who has ...”

“... and outrageously reactionary fantasist at the Daily Telegraph, who wrote under the pseudonym Peter Simple. Yet Wharton’s attempts to ridicule the enemies of Unionism were funny precisely because they drew on received assumptions about both Unionists and liberals. Among the most memorable creations in his gallery of bien-pensant absurdity was the trendy ...”

“... placard, shading in the letters of a message that she later tied to one of the crowd barriers. It read, very roughly: Thank you, Assange, for giving us a history of the vanquished. She was thinking of something by Brecht, she said, or possibly Walter Benjamin. An older, more eccentric figure assured me that Assange had sneaked away from the embassy the week ...”

“... cultural delegates in 1954 had been involved in these events as young men, and most of them had read Edgar Snow’s hugely influential – and partisan – Red Star over China, published by the Left Book Club in 1937. Wright suggests that Snow’s book and the journalism of Agnes Smedley accounted for just about everything these travellers knew about modern ...”

“... These​ two books will be read, inevitably, as studies of neoliberalism, a world order – and a word – that has snuck up on us in the last few decades. I say ‘snuck up’ for a reason. I remember the 1980s, when our antagonists were identifiable and embodied: the one with the handbag, the one with the cowboy hat, and then their grey successors ...”