“... the British medievalist T.F. Tout, who taught at the University of Manchester, where Fawtier had held a lectureship for five years after the First World War. Tout was known for the Ford Lectures he had delivered in Oxford in 1913 on the reign of Edward II, and above all for his six-volume Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England. Fawtier ...”

“... as if he were swimming down to land, but kept safe in his mother’s clutch. In the other hand she held the sort of small, shabby suitcase that pulp fiction illustrators give to people running away from their lives – to heroines with gumption, or plausibly handsome yet morally flawed young men. The suitcase holds the protagonists’ future. The man uses his ...”

“... then on to Malawi and Zimbabwe, in November 1991, will underestimate the hardiness and courage of David Livingstone, who traversed, on foot, thousands of miles of bush, mountain and swamp, fearsome to behold even from the air. But Livingstone’s country had not been unknown to the Portuguese, established on both east and west coast for centuries. The term ...”

“... a suspended sentence for sexually assaulting two women on set in 2021). The festival leadership held crisis meetings and was readying to remove the films of the offending directors and actors from the programme when it was revealed that the list was a scam, created by a far-right account on X. Protests and symbols of protest are banned from the red carpet ...”

“... rode into Vienna in an open Mercedes, lifting and lowering his right arm while his left hand ‘held tight to his belt buckle’, as Gregor von Rezzori wrote in Cain, ‘as though he were afraid that his pants might fall down’. This being the age of balcony politics, Hitler appeared on one to announce the Anschluss, the ‘joining’ of Austria to the ...”

“... The fact that he was white, like several other major West Coast jazz musicians, was not generally held against him. Astonishing to discover, especially given how few people outside music know much about him now, that he came second after Charlie Parker in a 1951 Down Beat readers’ poll for Best Alto Sax Player Ever. Even the most partisan Bird-fanciers ...”

“... a painting before, or a piece of sculpture. In 1971 there was work there in my school holidays. I held a light from the wings on a production of Murder in the Cathedral. I remember vividly shining it on the actresses in the chorus as they chanted: Does the bird sing in the south? Only the sea bird cries Driven inland by the storm. What sign of the spring of ...”

“... farmers who sold up and took what capital they could with them. ‘From the famine onwards,’ David Fitzpatrick writes, ‘male and female emigrants were quite evenly balanced. Boys and girls alike swarmed out of every parish, every social stratum, and almost every household, systematically thinning out the fabric of Irish society.’About a million ...”

“... best-known Marxist in the years of the Soviet Union’s death throes, when Marxism of any kind was held to be empirically disproved and indelibly tainted with mass murder. Moreover, his particular commitments went considerably beyond an axiomatic materialism in which economic conditions necessarily carve out whatever room for manoeuvre artists and writers ...”

“... far from one-eyed. Initially, the new party, in a semi-formal alliance with the Liberals led by David Steel, enjoyed a heady surge of popularity. A Gallup poll in December 1981 put the Tories on 23 per cent, Labour on 24, and the new Alliance on 51. Jenkins triumphantly re-entered Parliament by winning Glasgow Hillhead in March 1982, but the Alliance’s ...”

“... Dracula with Bela Lugosi. In their 1995 book Dark Carnival: The Secret World of Tod Browning, David Skal and Elias Savada recount the casting process for Freaks: In a Montreal sideshow, scouts discovered Johnny Eckhardt … a startling ‘half-boy’ whose body ended below the ribcage. The armless, legless Prince Randian was a native of British Guiana who ...”

“... diplomats have all called on Thein Sein. Each has returned cautious, but unmistakably impressed. David Cameron, who this week became the most important visitor so far, urged us all to ‘pay tribute … to the leadership of President Thein Sein and his government, which has been prepared to release political prisoners, hold by-elections and legalise ...”

“... a dose. Other houses are clean and tidy, like the one belonging to a 27-year-old whom we’ll call David: children’s clothes hang in a courtyard, there is expensive furniture, a big flat-screen TV. A six-year-old girl, vivacious in her pretty mauve dress, welcomes visitors with a radiant smile. David is a ...”

“... It is entirely symptomatic that she should devote disproportionate space to the work of David Irving, which has little credibility amongst scholars, and which was authoritatively disposed of in a major essay by Martin Broszat, one of many current historians whom Dawidowicz implicitly belittles.In all these ways the discussion of the literature is ...”

“... apparent that black Australians were dying in prison cells in quite appalling numbers. Hawke held off on a Royal Commission for as long as he could, but now it’s under way, and the Aboriginal issue can’t be kept out of the headlines.Australians to 1788, using research by the economic historian Noel Butlin, proposes that the indigenous population at ...”