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“... had ceased to exist long ago. Not at all. Mrs Thatcher wants to create eight or nine more peers. Michael Foot, as a final gesture of leadership, wants to create 29. What can be the explanation of this extraordinary demand? Once upon a time the Leader of the Labour movement was solid against the House of Lords. Can you imagine Keir Hardie as a peer? When ...”

“... he would have been a disaster. His vision of human nature is utterly two-dimensional and black-and-white, and his political opinions are dogmatically prescriptive – with an arrogance that only the wholly immature or innocent ever dare show. His world is full of goodies and baddies. The goodies spend all their time in the ‘forefront of community ...”

“... with the brutal sacking of Director-General Alasdair Milne and continuing with the appointment of Michael Checkland as his successor and the recruitment of John Birt as Deputy D-G with a remit to sort out the news and current affairs operation. Checkland, an accountant, set about pruning the BBC while Birt embarked on a root-and-branch reform of the news and ...”

“... He uncovers an international conspiracy led by the Russian secret services to put their man in the White House. He tells the British government about it, but they ignore him, believing the ‘Russian’ candidate will never be elected. He turns to the FBI, which takes his dossier more seriously. Then, two weeks before the election, the FBI’s director ...”

“... succession of events that fed into one another until the final collapse. In When Life Nearly Died, Michael Benton, a palaeontologist, describes the decades of research that led to the current consensus about what happened, and argues against an extraterrestrial cause for the catastrophe. It is astonishing that scientists have acknowledged the existence of this ...”

“... King’s chapel was a ‘folie de grandeur’ – the college had, he thought, been hoodwinked by Michael Jaffé, the Rubens expert – and did not suit the chapel’s interior (‘too coloured’). He said that Roger Fry had taught him all he knew about pictures – save ‘my own feelings about them’. Another meeting came about through the young painter ...”

“... hat (Class 2, Civil Uniform, Napoleon style, with double leaf of gold bullion on one side and a white ostrich feather border round the top) his first devoirs were to the Arab presidents, not to the French Délégué Général. And his first duty for the presidents, he felt, was to help them get free elections, and soon. This would be followed, and soon, by ...”

“... a grave threat to democracy. The man who personifies this phenomenon more than anyone else is MK Michael Ben-Ari of the National Union faction, a protégé of Meir Kahane, whose Kach party (‘Thus’) was outlawed many years ago. Kahane himself was elected to the Knesset only once. Whenever he rose to speak, most of the other MKs left the hall. By ...”

“... It is topped with work by earlier painters – Edward Dayes, to whom he was apprenticed, Michael ‘Angelo’ Rooker and Paul Sandby among them – and tailed with pictures by those who were influenced by him: including Turner, de Wint, Cotman and Constable.For a sense of why Girtin matters it is best to start with his late watercolours, the views of ...”

“... the concern of ornithologists about its threat to the racial purity of its Spanish relation, the white-fronted duck.The human population in the park changes, too. There is a rumour that the number of young Australians and South Africans in Southfields is in the tens of thousands. Whatever the figure, it has been enough to change the culture of the ...”

“... programme affecting ‘up to two million’ carefully selected Americans. You have to be white to qualify. Just after the Secret Histories documentary, broadcast on Channel 4 on 28 August, which showed autopsy footage of aliens who crashed in New Mexico in 1947, Michael Moore’s TV Nation described the Jerusalem ...”

“... of the desk-bound and lionised, and J.M. Coetzee too showed signs of becoming a chronic case. Now Michael Chabon has produced Moonglow, supposedly based on conversations from 1989 between a writer called Michael Chabon and his dying grandfather, an engineer for whom space travel in general and rockets in particular were an ...”

“... we can know, what we might yet find out and what we cannot know about the first fifty years of white settlement in this most southerly settlement of Australia. Now comes Boyce’s detailed study of Van Diemen’s Land, from its first convict settlements in 1803 until it became Tasmania in 1856, after a new wave of prosperous settlers tried to shrug off the ...”

“... Nor has it been confined to the South: the North has had its own, scarcely less virulent form of white supremacy. The struggle to achieve full enfranchisement for black people in the United States has produced many martyrs: Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. And now ...”

“... in a girdered hive.(‘Let Me Measure My Prayer with Sleep’)Such lines exemplify something Michael Schmidt once identified in Graham’s voice as ‘a strange hostility towards the reader’. The influence of Dylan Thomas has often been noticed, and the effect of the densely packed verbalism is, as in Thomas, principally to imply the labour that has ...”