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“... plenty of damage. (In the case of H. floresiensis, Indonesia’s leading palaeoanthropologist took the first skeleton away for himself, kept it for a period of months, and returned it severely damaged.) I especially like Neolithic sites, in which Britain and Ireland are very rich: I love the sense that by stretching out our imagination and empathy in ...”

“... One of John Cheever’s most famous stories is called ‘The Swimmer’. It is set, like much of his fiction, in the lawned suburbs somewhere outside New York City, and it is filled, like most of his fiction, with despair. The hero, Neddy Merrill, the father of four daughters, is sitting by a neighbour’s pool drinking gin when the idea comes to him that he might reach home by doing a lap of all of his neighbours’ pools on the way ...”

“... on Churchill’s life at Chartwell during the Twenties and Thirties. His son, the third Earl, who took over the work, died tragically young in 1985. Robin Birkenhead’s draft extended to the end of 1940. It had been shown to Sir John Colville, who was asked to finish the story. He declined, but wrote an epilogue giving his ...”

“... them. ‘The monastery of Evesham was suppressed by King Henry VIII … at evensong time,’ John of Alcester recorded, ‘the convent being in the choir at this verse Deposuit potentes, and would not suffer them to make an end.’ Four years into the dissolution, there were few wealthy abbeys left to seize; the very last was Waltham Abbey, on 23 March ...”

“... on Robert Peel, the prime minister. The young and impressionable Engels, whose daily walk to work took him past the Manchester offices of the Cobden brothers’ calico empire, was impressed. For the rest of his life, Engels was convinced that Cobden was the archetype of the English revolutionary bourgeois. So was Marx. Nowadays, Cobden is revered as the ...”

“... of progressive thinking, though it cannot be pretended that all the luminaries here marshalled took the right side. Shakespeare frequently took the wrong one; and probably few radicals have ever been progressive all round. A county petition in 1780, an expostulation against corruption and misgovernment, alluded to the ...”

“... I received my serious call to a life of devout tennis-watching in the year (1947) when Mr Kramer took the men’s singles championship at Wimbledon. His court personality was that of a Nice American Kid. (He still speaks of latterday players as ‘kids’, a term that sits on John Newcombe and Stan Smith as askew as on a ...”

“... lodge, and, when they failed to recant, to be racked in the Tower.’ He searched his friend John Petit’s house for heretical literature and left him in prison, untried. He applauded the burning of a harmless leather seller called John Tewkesbury, noting: ‘There never was a wretch, I wene, better worthy.’ And he ...”

“... of overlordship and secured recognition that Scotland was an independent sovereign entity. Bruce took the throne in 1306 after a long period of wrangling over the succession. The death of Alexander III in 1286 without surviving issue and the subsequent death in 1290 of his young granddaughter, Margaret, Maid of Norway, while she was being brought to ...”

“... covers the same period as this new collection; but there was plenty of work for the new editor, John Evans. The diaries were begun when Britten was 15 and ended, rather abruptly, when he was 25. They were written in pocket diaries, the earlier entries mostly fitting into the space allowed by the format, four days per page. As his interests widened Britten ...”

“... Pierre Boulez took his final bow in the opera pit last summer at the Aix-en-Provence festival. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the production was the music chosen: Leoš Janáček’s opera From the House of the Dead, written in 1928, the final year of his life. Boulez seemed a little ambivalent about the choice ...”

“... they thinking?’ on the way back. In Paris, the college girls went to lectures at Sciences Po, took photos of sens interdit signs (as exotic as red phoneboxes), took seminars on the Communist Party, and read Sartre but not Beauvoir, who wasn’t thought suitable. They were strict about only talking French to each ...”

“... draughtsman whose main income came from rendering the designs of others, or rather of one other: John Soane, who first employed him as a draughtsman and later gave him individual commissions and other financial support. He seems to have been difficult and touchy. He had trouble making enough money to keep himself and a large family, and died ...”

“... Ankle-deep in apposite litter, he trampled the stuff that he depended on. No wonder too that he took against the dummy of a book on his work and his sources put together in the late 1980s by Bruce Bernard, the layouts for which paired paintings to photographs. Not that those involved in the project (least of all Bruce Bernard, a dedicated admirer) intended ...”

“... seemed so comic. But the early incredulity often made points which were lost when solemn passions took over. I remember an editorial conference, the Task Force scarcely beyond Finistère. Rights and wrongs had not yet come into the discussion; the argument was between those who thought something real was taking place and those who assumed they were having a ...”