“... a chapter to itself in an 1897 book on women’s sweated labour, Robert Harborough Sherard’s White Slaves of England. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Cradley Heath was known as the world’s capital of hand-hammered chain-making, and boasted, somewhat weirdly, that the anchor chain of the Titanic had been manufactured there. It was an ...”

“... less certain than they were when the ships were planned). Their paintwork, with the usual CalMac white superstructure above a black hull, dips in a curve towards the stern, aiming to give an impression of speed, power and modernity. A century ago liners sometimes had an unnecessary third or fourth funnel to achieve the same effect.The Comet was built only a ...”

“... take note: tough-guy-hipster-fedora-favourers – Al Capone, Humphrey Bogart, J. Edgar Hoover, William S. Burroughs, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Depp – might all be considered unwitting imitators of Sarah Bernhardt.) 5. The Rampant (er … ) Erotomania. (One moment, Herr Doktor – cough cough – my throat is tickling me.) World famous by her late ...”

“... as a Momentum branch flag and a ‘Women for Corbyn’ banner. The crowd was largely young and white, but there was an older generation too – veterans of the struggle. Behind me a young man who had come with his mother dipped into a Waitrose bag and – perhaps eager to pre-empt the charge of champagne socialism – produced a mini bottle of ...”

“... Gardner joined in to say, quite reasonably, that the 1669 version means: ‘why wear this last white garment? It symbolises penitence or virginity, and neither is appropriate.’ Empson’s reply is that her reading is textually ‘impossible’. When another correspondent points out that in the course of his review he misread some of Carew’s ...”

“... future citizen of Soviet America’.After twelve issues, two of the young editors, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, appalled by the Moscow show trials of 1936 and 1937, wrested the magazine from party control. The new PR emerged in December 1937. F.W. Dupee, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy were also on the masthead, as was George L.K. Morris, artist, art ...”

“... from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William towards her, “keep thy wit for thy plays, for wit is a poor actor that comes on and plays his part and is heard no more, but the part I would have you play hath more will in it than wit.”’ Has there been a year when such a book would make the Booker ...”

“... lashes out with a shaky version of the truth. She begins by referencing Moses, the children’s white mouse and the patriarch of the nursery cage. She ends by referencing males in general: ‘He sticks that thing of his … into the hole she pees out of … It’s a thing men do, it’s all they want to do, and you won’t like it.’ The phrases hit Aroon ...”

“... moment of bipartisanship: in the 50-year history of the NHS, there hasn’t been another like it. William Beveridge’s 300-page report, Social Insurance and Allied Service, was submitted in November 1942. By the end of 1944, it had sold over 200,000 copies. It had been commissioned with postwar reconstruction in mind and was to lead to one of this ...”

“... servant John Vassall as a Soviet agent and illustrated with a photo of him lying on his bed in white underpants, ‘a spy and homo – a gilt-edged specimen of his type’. This gay-basher’s guide to ‘THE CRAWLER’, ‘THE FUSSY DRESSER’ etc sums up and hopes to activate prejudice, but is perhaps less revealing than the Daily Herald’s ‘What I ...”

“... to the liberal jurisprudence of the 1960s and 1970s, has long been criticised by the left. As William Brennan, the liberal titan of the court in the second half of the 20th century, declared in 1985, ‘Those who would restrict claims of right to the values of 1789 specifically articulated in the constitution turn a blind eye to social progress and eschew ...”

“... for operating as ‘a money-hustling hag’: noticing how admired her husband is among ‘young white men drawn to the more “transgressive” elements of modernism’, she sets about ‘milking money’ from these ‘Bataille Boys’, renting out Sylvère’s attention for ever higher fees. She invests the money in real estate, buying unpleasant ...”

“... Europe. In one demonstration at the Royal Institution in February 1892 he spelled out the name of William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, in electric light and made glass vacuum tubes glow as if by magic. Lord Rayleigh, who was to share a Nobel Prize for the discovery of argon, saw in Tesla ‘the genius of a discoverer’, but others weren’t so ...”

“... pounding the back lots and working the studio corridors, at the age of 29 Clancy drove his red and white DeSoto convertible across America and went into European exile. ‘It came back to this, the sheer shock, in my own country, of walking along the street and seeing faces behind which are no ideas, or even enjoyment. No. No more of this. It was time to ...”

“... Infiltrators and informers posed significant problems for the IRA leadership. The memoir of William Matchett, a former RUC man, stated that at any given time one IRA member in 33 was a Special Branch agent. If one adds agents who were handled by the army and MI5 the total was far higher. Many were never discovered and a few have subsequently written ...”