“... a proper word for it. And there was no such thing as Austria, either.’ I thought of Musil when I read a passage from Keith Ajegbo’s recent Diversity and Citizenship report. The investigator was talking to a little seven-year-old, who was the only English child in her class. After all the others had talked about their origins, she said sadly: ‘I come from ...”

“... the Thaw and de-Stalinisation in the 1950s, believed in socialism with a human face in the 1960s, read the reform-minded journal Novy Mir, had a passionate respect for high culture, and listened to the songs of the balladeers Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotsky on their tape recorders. It’s not a cohort defined by age because the postwar students included ...”

“... the editor of the Times, soon realised what a talent they had hired: Cockburn had long since read and absorbed almost the entire body of English literature, emerging as a wonderfully fluent and vivid writer. But his salary didn’t come close to paying for his untidy, riotous life in a huge Kurfürstendamm flat, and it wasn’t until 1929 that Dawson ...”

“... to abuse their position of spiritual authority by getting hold of grimoires (which they could now read) and charging parishioners for extra services involving the conjuration of spirits.Rates of education among the rest of society improved during the same period, in tandem with the rise of print. Many of the ‘cunning folk’, rural practitioners of ...”

“... which ended with the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The perestroika story, as we read it in the West, was about an enlightened Soviet leader’s effort to democratise internally, while at the same time ending the Cold War. The first part failed; the second succeeded, but ended up looking like a victory for the other side. After the Soviet ...”

“... scene off by heart, as do several of the others. This is new, as actors would normally expect to read the scene and if they are bad readers, as many actors are, this would have to be discounted when assessing their ability. Nowadays because competition is so fierce actors come knowing the audition scene by heart and so it’s much easier to gauge what they ...”

“... second has been something of a mystery until now. In January 1958 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Peter Thorneycroft, resigned in protest at the growth of public expenditure. In a successful disinformation campaign it was put about that he had resigned in dispute over some relatively trifling sum. But as the files reveal, Thorneycroft had been raising ...”

“... order his dishevelled social and sexual lives for good. The year before they married, the diaries peter out. Stanley Weintraub, who has edited all 12 diaries and the fragments from 1880 and 1917 into two stout volumes, gives the game away in his lively account of their provenance. When Shaw married Charlotte, he left his papers at his mother’s house in ...”

“... book shows that Biafra and Ethiopia have not jaded our response to suffering, and as we read, our pain turns to anger and indignation: we despise those responsible and are ready to believe anything about them. There is, incidentally, no doubt about responsibility for the disaster. Stalin must be primarily answerable as the leading advocate of ...”

“... research Claire Tomalin draws – concludes that Dickens visited Nelly for elocution lessons. Peter Ackroyd has put an only slightly less pure interpretation on the connection: Dickens and Nelly enjoyed (or suffered) a ‘sexless’ marriage, in which she played out the part of the idealised virgin bride. An opposite line which traces itself back to ...”

“... riches and their kids, rotten before they are ripe, as Diderot said of the Russians improved by Peter. Buying and selling and even raising or making essentials is just that. It’s a necessary basis for civilisation, even a part, but it’s not civilisation itself. There’s no real way to glorify business just as it’s hard to glorify eating and ...”

“... them Hugh Stephenson, Business Editor of the Times, and Labour’s recent convert, Peter Hain), adding a prologue and epilogue of his own. This original enterprise is certainly illuminating in its revelation of the reasons why a handful of ordinary people with varied experience belong to, and in many cases are active in, the Labour Party. Their ...”

“... passages have been inserted, their historicity guaranteed by the editor John Steel. We read that England was beset, then as now, by vandalism, defacement, crime based on envy, vile domestic architecture, eyesores at beauty spots, over-tight trousers and captious book-reviewers. Southey (if it is he) puzzles over some of our manufactures: who needs ...”

“... figure, Wild proclaiming that the more nefarious trickeries of Homeric and Virgilian heroes (read in schoolboy cribs) confirmed him in his high opinion of the wisdom of the ancients, or Ubu taking on the features of Shakespearean kings. Satirists have more than once compared the practical jokes of schoolboys with the cruel whims of tyrant-emperors and ...”

“... it out with other notably Scottish words, wherever they could be found. His son records how he read a great deal of Scots in preparation for his translation, and when, for instance, he came upon the rare word doit (‘darnel’), plucked it up to use in place of the Authorised Version tares. Conversely, he avoided anything that might appear as an ...”