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“... broadcasts to specialised (and centralised) BBC departments; over the years, he lost the King’s College Christmas carols to Music, Songs of Praise to Religion and Come Dancing to London. He spent the last years of his 33-year BBC career producing a programme that might have seemed a broadcasting backwater, but which anticipated the trend towards the ...”

“... in motion, for example: a barn owl with a mouse in its beak, caught by Eric Hosking in 1948, a brown rat photographed by Stephen Dalton as it jumped from a bin in 1983. Curiosity about the look of exotic tribes was not limited to pictures from abroad. The four performers of the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance, taken by ...”

“... with the classics of the genre, is off. There is another premise, another genre in question. David Selznick told Wilder that ‘mixing gangsters and comedy wouldn’t work,’ and perhaps even Wilder didn’t know at first how wrong his adviser was. Would the St Valentine’s Day ...”

“... Every picture tells a story – even the illustrations on the covers of books. Michael Kater’s cover shows a rather shabby, cabbage-patch Hitler attending a harvest festival in 1936, receiving the salutes of a crowd in which the faces of adoring women are prominent. The image is both revealing and misleading. The peasant costumes certainly alert us to the affinities between Nazism and provincial kitsch, and Hitler’s studied geniality also reminds us of his extraordinary personal popularity, always much greater than that of the party as a whole or of its other leaders ...”

“... buoyed up by the apparent successes of the post-war welfare state, turned with relish to Britain’s industrial past, partly to test and refine the grand generalisations of Toynbee, the Hammonds, Clapham and Ashton, and partly to see what (if any) guidelines that past might yield for those who wished to transform the Sahara Desert of the present into the ...”

“... event. The first and second surveys were undertaken by PEP in 1966 and 1972, the third by PEP’s successor, the PSI, in 1982-83. Black and White Britain acknowledges that the UK is a multi-racial society and that this fact has brought with it considerable benefits and at the same time posed problems which call in question the civility of our society, our ...”

“... its report on the morning of 6 July, seven years and 21 days after it was established by Gordon Brown with a remit to ‘look at the run-up to the conflict, the conflict itself and the reconstruction, so that we can learn lessons’.* It offers a long and painful account of an episode that may come to be seen as marking ...”

“... Atwood​ fans, does it matter that The Handmaid’s Tale is at bottom ‘a deraced slave narrative’, as Sophie Lewis calls it in Full Surrogacy Now? In the novel, as Lewis says, people of colour – ‘Children of Ham’, in Gilead language – are resettled in ‘Homeland One’, somewhere in North Dakota. In The Testaments, a sequel set 15 years later, Gilead’s ‘ridiculous Certificate of Whiteness Scheme’ has collapsed ...”

“... afternoon in March when Desert Orchid won the Cheltenham Gold Cup. Desert Orchid was the nation’s most popular racehorse, a grey steeplechaser who had become, in tabloid-speak, the ‘housewives’ favourite’, or as the broadsheets might put it, ‘the horse whose appeal transcended his sport’. The Cheltenham Gold Cup is the most important race in the ...”

“... you knew – left or right – was for the war.’ ‘I am not a radical,’ Coates said. Even so he found it ‘searing’ to watch ‘reasonable people assemble sober arguments for a disaster’. In retrospect, the most remarkable of these reasonable people were not the neoconservatives but the liberals – some of them now Coates’...”

“... railway takes you to the top of the mountain with the strange name: a nonsense word, a child’s burble, Tibidabo. You see the city of Barcelona spread out beneath you; beyond it the Mediterranean. Très beau panorama, the Michelin guide says, as well it may, since the name is not the nonsense word it looks but the Devil’s ...”

“... Duncan Sprott’s The Clopton Hercules is an interesting book, powerfully written, and certainly (indeed, remorselessly) clever: but one-tracked, and self-satisfied. It takes a traditional target, the bizarrerie of upper middle-class Victorian sexual behaviour, and blasts away at it with satirical vigour and relish: but the more points are scored, the more pointless the exercise begins to seem ...”

“... an unknown poet, and chose to ignore the facts that there were several collections of Mangan’s poems at large and that his life and work had been extensively written about. ‘Mangan has been a stranger in his country,’ Joyce claimed, ‘a rare and unsympathetic figure in the streets, where he is seen going forward alone like one who does penance for ...”

“... and the obliterating of the evidence of hundreds of lives. At the wedding, the bridegroom’s mother knocks over the punchbowl, sending liquid all over the polished floors. The story can now expire into figurative ellipsis, the mere assemblage of careful parts having done its subtle work of implication and connection. That is my own crude sketch, but it ...”

“... to think, cynically, that the top echelons of the family did this deliberately: support both sides so that whichever faction of the ruling class wins, the family never loses. That was often the case. Not this time. The origins of the family divide, I’m pleased to say as a Marxist, lay in a dispute over land between two brothers in the middle years of the ...”