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“... Beechcombings is a very different book from Woodlands, and rather suffers from the comparison. Richard Mabey’s intention is to use a series of ‘discursive essays’ to build up ‘a brief history of the narratives we’ve constructed about trees over the past thousand years to make them accessible, useful, comprehensible and obedient’, and to use the ...”

“... to keep escalating. Despite the ominous backdrop of the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon began a series of occasional bilateral discussions with Leonid Brezhnev aimed at managing the Cold War more calmly. Tensions in Asia were high, and China’s rivalry with the Soviet Union was intensifying, while the Berlin Wall had already ...”

“... He is, he says, “a reluctant writer”, though he doesn’t really know why.’ A second novel, Preston Falls, appeared in 1998 to respectful rather than awestruck reviews; a year later a story collection, The Wonders of the Invisible World, went down pretty well. This time he was on leave from Newsweek when the interviewer called. ‘I’m supposed to be ...”

“... three men were sent to prison after blocking a convoy of trucks carrying drilling equipment to the Preston New Road fracking site in Lancashire, operated by Cuadrilla. At around 8 a.m. on 25 July 2017, as seven lorries approached the site, Richard Roberts, a piano restorer from London, got through a police cordon and climbed ...”

“... the Astor Times and later with the Thomson Times. It was long after the event that I learned how Richard Scott, Laurance’s cousin and the chairman of the Scott Trust, flew to London from Washington on what my old employers would have called a ‘mercy mission’ to save us from being sold into slavery by his kinsman. This ignorance may have had something ...”

“... where I live, a swing made out of rope and a stick on which children went swooping out over the Preston-Kendal canal has disappeared, and a shelter made of branches in a disused orchard has fallen in and rotted away. These things have not been replaced. Macfarlane’s hope is that a conserving and reviving of country words will encourage ‘creative ...”

“... theology became orthodoxy for men like Dod, Cleaver, Bradshaw. Hildersham, Baynes, Sibbes, Preston. Thomas Hooker and Ames. Dr Kendall sums up: ‘we are saved by grace, we are assured by works. Other writers above have implied this: Sibbes says it.’ Assurance is ‘a reward of exact walking’. Men should ‘labour to be such as God may love ...”

“... called A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War – it’s no longer said to be concise – Paul Preston points out that this prelude to the Second World War has generated as many books as the Second World War itself. During the Cold War, with the CIA busy collaborating with anarchists and Trotskyists to try to obscure ‘the fact that ...”

“... the sun doesn’t shine’ is pure ‘Carry on up the Corner Flag’. Later, Kuper interviews the Preston North End winger Tom Finney about the Cup Final of 1941, when Preston beat Arsenal. Wasn’t it odd, he asks, to play the final in bombed-out London? ‘I wasn’t all that interested in the war when I was ...”

“... it to the BBC complaints department, and had not mentioned it at lunch with Gilligan’s boss, Richard Sambrook. But he then made ‘three key moves’: on 25 June he denounced Gilligan’s story to the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs (‘Until the BBC acknowledges that is a lie, I will keep banging on’); on 26 June he wrote to Sambrook demanding a ...”

“... nonpayment of rent, or breach of the peace. He was fined for giving his apprentice Lactantius Preston a bloody nose in 1576, and was himself assaulted by another apprentice a few years later. It is hard to avoid seeing Marlowe’s touchy aggressive temper – intellectual and physical – prefigured in his father. His sister Anne seems to have been a ...”

“... from the passage above; but Keynes had ‘never said a truer thing’. Here is the theme of Richard Cockett’s study, Thinking the Unthinkable, which has seized on a superb subject. Using archival and oral sources to supplement the published record, it traces the activities of a number of intellectual pressure groups, or think-tanks, in proselytising ...”

“... being replayed in the UK. Substitute Tesco for Wal-Mart, Waterstone’s for Barnes & Noble, Richard & Judy for Oprah, and the issues are identical. There is no need to substitute for Borders: its Oxford Street branch is a replica of the South Lake outlet. Until the abolition of the Net Book Agreement in 1997, Britain had a distinctly different style of ...”

“... ceremonies, but some now endured a clergy which insisted on novelties. When, in 1584, the vicar of Preston Capes refused to perform the ‘churching’ (or thanksgiving service) prescribed in the Prayer Book for new mothers, he was beaten up by a butcher whose wife wanted to be churched as usual. In 1620, Bishop Harsnett of Norwich began to insist that women ...”

“... lies an important earlier collection, the work published in 1972, edited by Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, as Household and Family in Past Time. This book established the remarkable constancy of average household size in England since the 16th century, despite people’s mobility, with a norm of a little under five persons until the low birth rate and ...”