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“... for the delay). Raleigh’s attempts at colonisation followed hard on other ambitious voyages. Martin Frobisher thought he had found gold in the course of his 1576 search for the Northwest Passage. In 1578 he retraced his steps and brought home 1350 tons of ore from which ‘neither gold, silver nor any other metal could be drawn’. It was thrown away or ...”

“... which are the real subjects. Deadpan looks at present-day English suburbs in photographs by Martin Parr and a painting of a patio by David Rayson are also urban landscapes rather than garden pictures. In Rayson’s picture white plastic chairs on a neatly mown lawn lean around a table as if avoiding the gaze of the identical new brick houses which ...”

“... These are the MPs who are beloved of the whips, the so-called lobby fodder, and according to Martin Bell in A Very British Revolution, they are also the MPs who tend to claim the most for expenses: ‘There was nothing they wouldn’t claim for or, when the division bell sounded, vote for.’ Many of the current 646 MPs will not be returning to ...”

“... Peter Lilley, an international fraud investigator and no relation of the Tory MP for Hitchin and Harpenden, has written a book called Dirty Dealing: The Untold Truth about Global Money Laundering (Kogan Page, £16.99). Before outlining how best to prevent the crime, he explains the various ways to go about committing it, such as opening an anonymous Austrian Sparbuch – savings book – of which there are estimated to be twenty-six million in existence (Austria, for the record, has a population of just over eight million ...”

“... their past. Allison points to the environmental planning which has restricted development and, in Peter Hall’s phrase, ‘contained urban England’. Such restriction is in one sense costly – the price of land and population density have been raised – but it was a price well worth paying for the protection of a countryside unsurpassed in the ...”

“... in the Cold War … is hard to imagine.’There​ are other ways of telling the story. To turn to Peter Reddaway’s memoir of his work with the dissidents is to move not only in time – his story starts in the 1960s and runs through to 1991 – but also to another emotional register, one of high idealism on the part of altruistic Westerners. To be sure, the ...”

“... have their place in a tally of the 20th century’s most memorable images. The last of the five, Martin Munkácsi, made no single photograph that has a firm place in such lists, but The First Fashion Photograph for Harper’s Bazaar (1933) showing Lucile Brokaw running by the sea, makes clear why he was as broadly influential as any of them. He proved models ...”

“... of England (1949-55) – we see the first fruits of the appointment. It goes without saying that Peter Clarke’s volume is all his own, but it stands nonetheless in the shadow of the General Editor. Not only has Cannadine issued a prospectus to go with the new series, re-stating those views which supply the criteria by which it is to be measured, but ...”

“... included leading figures from the Independent Group, such as Eduardo Paolozzi and the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, who displayed a series of found objects in a post-apocalyptic mirrored shed. Richard Hamilton’s group presented a funfair vision that launched the British Pop Art movement. Robby the Robot, star of the science-fiction movie Forbidden ...”

“... Fascinating, too, at the onset of the witchcraft craze, to find a little-known Nominalist, Martin Plantsch, marshalling arguments which ought to have nipped it in the bud and saved countless women from torture. Plantsch denied that hosts or holy water had real powers that witches could exploit for devilish purposes. Luther’s lack of iconoclastic zeal ...”

“... is, they couldn’t care less. The information is of no use to them. Until recently, George R.R. Martin would’ve been another serious candidate for that mayoralty. He has for decades been an immensely prolific and successful writer of fantasy, unusual in having more than one series on the go simultaneously. (He’s also a fan of his own milieu. ...”

“... it, but through his buildings at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the churches of St Martin-in-the-Fields and St Mary-le-Strand, he has probably had as great an effect on popular ideas of what a Classical building should look like as any of his contemporaries. This influence was compounded by his Book of Architecture, which was so widely used as ...”

“... for the ‘green belt’ areas, described many years ago by our foremost environmental geographer, Peter Hall, as ‘a civilised form of apartheid’. Greenness is flexible. It means whatever each of us decides it should mean. Plenty of people, undeterred by history or events, see it as the natural habitat of the political Left. ...”

“... places. The sequences featuring three eventually famous friends, James Prior of Northern Ireland, Peter May of England, one of its cricket captains, and William Rees-Mogg, late of the Times, are among the tightest and funniest things he has written. May is present, while utterly silent, as a batsman of genius, and as a figure of fun and a pillar of rectitude ...”

“... is the title of one important section of the book, containing essays by Patrick Minford, Martin Holmes and John Redwood. Minford recapitulates an already familiar analysis of the three parts of Thatcher’s economic programme, ‘the conquest of inflation, the promotion of efficiency, and the defeat of unemployment’, which were pursued in a ...”