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“... is probably why it was undiscovered for so long,’ says the New Zealand stamp collector Allan Berry. Even so, a stamp which may be considered very valuable by virtue of a flaw or because it is rare can lose that value if the experts get its provenance wrong. The Royal Philatelic Society’s Expert Committee would have examined about eight hundred ...”

“... League team, was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame. Motown, the record label founded by Berry Gordy in Detroit in 1959, quickly became synonymous with joyful pop songs influenced in equal measure by rock ’n’ roll and gospel, showing that Black youth culture wasn’t confined to race-related activism. Black-owned enterprises were thriving. But ...”

“... preceding the divorce (Teddy had embezzled and spent some $50,000 from her trust), Henry James couldn’t help regretting ‘that an intellectuelle – and an Angel – should require such a big pecuniary base.’ But require it she apparently did; and in the later decades of her career especially, she appears to have been capable of driving some ...”

“... merely the Staphylococcus aureus bacterium, its name deriving from the Greek for ‘grape-cluster berry’, which it resembles. A course of antibiotics, frequent sluicings with saline, and all would be well. In the days of Lister, Liston and Pasteur, such infections were thought to be an example of what was known as ‘hospitalism’, for the better ...”

“... Lord Beaverbrook was making the Daily Express ‘a paper of prejudice, not thought’. And the Berry brothers, up from Methyr Tydfil, were moving from Boxing magazine to the Financial Times and Daily Telegraph and to peerages as Lords Camrose and Kemsley. Fleet Street was vulgar, tough, unprincipled and competitive, a world away from the austere values of ...”

“... its own. Ray Charles was recording for Atlantic Records; Sam Cooke had left the Soul Stirrers; James Brown was touring with his Famous Flames. But Otis Redding wasn’t a soul singer yet. Billed as Otis ‘Rockin’ Redding or ‘Rockhouse Redding’, he sang rock and roll and remained heavily indebted to Little Richard. Bouncing around with Jenkins, who ...”

“... to the generation of young men who are the victims and perpetrators of knife crime. Siân Berry, who is running as the Greens’ candidate in the mayoral election, commissions an annual report into London’s lost youth services. In 2020 it showed that £34 million has been lost from youth services budgets since 2011; 101 youth centres closed, 733 ...”

“... calls them) taken from the fiction of Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, George Eliot, Hardy and James. As usual her commentary is essayistically loose. But one is struck by how good a reader she is. She is at her best when most closely interacting with the text, intelligently ‘feeling’ the novel, as it were. In the Dickens chapter, she illuminates the ...”

“... however, that she was a double agent. The long-term lover of her married FBI ‘handler’, James Smith, she had used him to gain access to confidential files which were then passed on to the Chinese secret services; she had also become involved with the head of security at a nuclear weapons facility. (It’s thought that Leung tipped off Beijing about ...”

“... epigenetics faded from view. With​ the discovery of the structure of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson in the 1950s, there was a renewed conviction among biologists – especially the physicists and engineers turned biologists like Crick – that what was needed was a ruthless reductionism. It was immediately recognised that DNA’s helical structure ...”

“... goldsmith, Guillaume Boucher. Meanwhile, back in France, the famous bibliophile Jean, duke of Berry – who owned a sumptuous anthology of travel literature – commissioned a cycle of tapestries for his own palace depicting the glories of the Great Khan. And the ceremonial presentation of New Year’s gifts at Caracorum, which so discomfited William of ...”

“... be typical of the middlebrow culture whose laureate was Longfellow and whose critical arbiter was James Russell Lowell, and from which Melville, unlike Henry James or Whitman, could not escape. Melville’s doomed attempt, in the late 1840s, to make himself into a country squire at Arrowhead, his farm in the ...”

“... Meanwhile there were other fictional portrayals of the final dismal collapse. In The House that Berry Built (published in January 1945) Dornford Yates went the whole distance, portraying an England that was simply no longer habitable. There had been a disastrous general election and there were some Cabinet members who ‘would not have qualified for the ...”

“... without limit, and, lacking the certainty of a completed thing, will never entirely disappoint. James Agee had a fortunate career on the face of it, as a New York freelance for almost two decades and then as a screenwriter. One of the large talents of American writing in the 1940s, Agee was a Southerner, from Knoxville, Tennessee, who came North, stayed and ...”

“... in a dizzying but pleasurable succession of meetings with his circle of intimates – Walter Berry, Paul Bourget, Abbé Mugnier, Ralph and Lisa Curtis, Madame de Cossé-Brissac, Rosa Fitz-James (“the best hostess I have ever known”), and Philomène de Lévis-Mirepoix – all members of the fashionable upper crust ...”