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“... An older generation of my compatriots would regard an Oxford history of Australia as an oxymoron. Quite early in the preparation of my own volume in the series of that name, I became interested in Bill Somerville, a trade-unionist who for nearly forty years served as the workers’ representative on the industrial tribunal of Western Australia. A skilled craftsman (his union, the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, rejoiced in the title of ‘the tin gods’), he grew up, with the Australian labour movement, in the hungry Nineties when troops were used to crush the shearers, miners and transport workers ...”

“... drama. I was possibly the only Englishman there. I remember interviewing the American director Nicholas Ray in his small hotel room – he began the interview by sweeping his dressing table clear of all his pill bottles – and I remember a meeting in a cinema in Paris. Renoir was there, bald-headed and wearing a mac, and Truffaut and Simone Signoret with ...”

“... sky to fall. The markets were re-opening after the weekend when the world first heard the name of Nicholas Leeson, the man who broke the bank in Singapore. It’s hard to remember how that dawn felt – now that we have reassured ourselves at the building society, peeped with relief beneath the mattress, patted the nest-egg – but the mood then was that the ...”

“... more effectively be felt to struggle for breath. The author’s humane values are looked after by Stephen Lewis, celebrated children’s book writer and member of the Parmenter Sub-Committee on Reading and Writing, one of 14 committees detailed to report back to the Official Commission on Childcare, ‘known to be a pet concern of the Prime ...”

“... was a lot more to him than one-liners and limericks; and if one thing emerges from the thickets of Stephen Lloyd’s excessively long biography, it is that Lambert had one of the finest musical minds of his generation and a critical faculty second to almost none. During his lifetime, you would have come across him as a conductor, either at the Vic-Wells ...”

“... with more celebrities than any other American. He did favours for them all, and they for him. Nicholas von Hoffman, a liberal news reporter who had been appalled by the young Roy Cohn who wreaked such havoc as Senator Joe McCarthy’s aide, has fallen into Cohn’s web, become entranced by him, and tries to get away with presenting him as a lovable ...”

“... was not a great success, and there wasn’t another until 1710, when a supplementary volume to Nicholas Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare’s plays reprinted Benson’s text. Benson’s revision remained the standard text until late in the 18th century; and indeed, these versions of the poems were still being reprinted in the 19th century. The return to the ...”

“... journalists; there wouldn’t be a proprietor pulling the strings. I might have been less naive if Nicholas Garland’s story of the muddle-and-fudge launch of the daily Independent, in his book Not Many Dead, had then been available. I might have thought differently, too, if I’d known that the inspiration for that innovatory Review dummy had been Motorcycle ...”

“... and Post-Impressionist pictures, Wilson relied on advance payments to the Parisian dealers Stephen Higgons and his wife, who obtained paintings from other dealers and runners who wanted immediate payment. The full extent of the Higgons account was concealed from the firm’s financial director. Then, during the mid-Seventies, there was a row with the ...”

“... she published. Carson began writing very early. At the age of ten she wrote war stories for St Nicholas, the best children’s magazine of its day; later, she won a scholarship to read English at Pennsylvania College for Women. There, however, she switched to science, under the influence of a brilliant biology teacher, Mary Scott Skinker. Carson paid her ...”

“... James would have got in free; but for her sex Mrs James would have had to pay. In other words, as Nicholas Bamforth’s essay in Foundations of Indirect Discrimination Law points out, pensionable age, which had been adopted by the council as an indicator of hardship, was treated by the judges as a proxy or surrogate for gender. Subsequent court decisions have ...”

“... to extend their possibilities, and they were willing to uproot themselves in order to do so. Nicholas Lemann’s judicious, well-written study concentrates on the poor blacks of Clarksdale, Mississippi, who moved to Chicago. The invention and production of cotton-picking machines had begun to undercut the value of their work, while Chicago, deprived of ...”

“... are indirectly responsible because it is they who have upset the poltergeist. When it appears that Stephen North, one of the child-star spoon-benders, always gets his best results just as Mrs North interrupts the experimental session by bringing in the tea, Professor John Hasted concludes that Stephen is marshalling his ...”

“... Butters’s The Triumph of Vulcan (1996), which includes a photograph of the English sculptor Stephen Cox (born 1946), stripped to the waist, caressing the smooth flanks of the quarry on Mons Porphyrites. Cox was the first person since antiquity to obtain porphyry from this source, and a huge chunk of it, partly worked by him and partly by Roman quarry ...”

“... not to mention (though often forgotten) songs of hope and faith expressed in religious terms. Nicholas Dawidoff’s richly descriptive account of country music, built around well-researched biographies of its practitioners, shows how varied the form was, from the start, in theme, style and instrumentation. There never has been one kind of country music ...”