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“... 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 Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old paralegal killed in Emancipation Park. It is true, as some have sanctimoniously pointed out, that even in her ...”

“... booth glows faintly behind Anna, in the depth of the shot, as she paces restlessly up and down. In Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1982), fantasist Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro), on a first date with barmaid Rita (Diahnne Abbott), hopes to impress her by leafing through his autograph album. It’s not long before ...”

“... in harmony with their natural environment. There was poignancy in the remark of the late Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, who said that before long the sight of sheep in a green field would be a rare delight. A future without such sights is human wickedness. Soon after reading this remark, I saw a television programme about Denmark in which the ...”

“... sum, is our culture’s chief pictorial repository for the so-called human condition. John Rupert Martin, Kenneth Clark, H.P. Chapman and E.H. Gombrich (respectively) were, each of them, writing out of a scholarly knowledge of the 17th century. Nonetheless, their terminologies raise a major problem: does the strength of our emotional response to Rembrandt ...”

“... studies of the subject have appeared since (by historians such as Paul Preston, Raymond Carr and Martin Blinkhorn, to mention three British examples). My memories of Homage to Catalonia were not only of the fine, evocative writing, perhaps Orwell’s best, but of his enthusiasm for the people with whom he had lived and fought. If, for some people of my ...”

“... governments have tried to subdue the Corporation. Mrs Thatcher’s man was said to have been Lord King, privatiser of British Airways, and a highly unsuitable choice that would have been. We have been spared Lord King, who has withdrawn, and rumour has had it that we may be given Lord Barnett instead, someone with no ...”

“... friction) outside the jurisdiction of St Paul’s and the bishop of London, at the churches of St Martin-le-Grand and St Mary Arches, belonging to the king and archbishop of Canterbury respectively. But many schools are recorded, one way or another, often outside cities: Orme counts more than 70 in the 13th century, their ...”

“... air above it seems briefly to stand for the task they are performing. But what is that something? Martin Sorrell, whose translations are often less free than Mason’s, and never less impressive, takes a bolder turn: Madame holds herself too stiff in the next field where sons of toil flurry like snow; clutching parasol; trampling umbels; too proud for ...”

“... My favourite moment in Martin Gilbert’s Life of Churchill is when the Prime Minister is touring the ruins of Hitler’s Chancellery in 1945: In the square in front of the building a crowd of Germans had gathered. Except for one old man who ‘shook his head disapprovingly’, Churchill later recalled, ‘they all began to cheer ...”

“... who were expelled from Zillertal in 1837 for obstinate Protestantism and given sanctuary by the King of Prussia. In the only photograph I have of his family, my great-grandfather Gustav stands straight and Prussian-cropped in his shabby uniform. (Gustav died when I was four and he was ninety: he had every tooth in his head, white and without cavities ...”

“... in Spain for the first time in 1517 to take up the crowns of Castile and Aragon, the teenage king was ignorant of the country, the people and the language; besides which, his councillors were fighting among themselves and Castile was on the brink of popular revolt. And Spain was only one of his problems.As if governing these disparate lands, with their ...”

“... if Milton is ignored, so, too, are the classical foundations on which his republicanism stands. As Martin Dzelzainis argues in an essay on his republicanism in the Companion, he drew on Sallust and Roman law for his account of the ennobling effects of liberty. One phrase in Milton’s History of Britain – ‘from obscure and small to grow eminent and ...”

“... since it is the thing which, if it goes wrong, could break our polity. In the words of Mervyn King’s last speech as governor of the Bank of England, at Mansion House on 19 June: the sheer size and complexity of global banks have led to failures of governance.Governments, regulators, prosecutors and non-executive directors have all struggled to come to ...”

“... people had not the faintest idea of this side of their own historic past, all lost in a jumble of King Arthur and Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth. The author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, strongly Scandinavian though his vocabulary is, had only the ‘Brutus legend’ to guide him to his own history; four centuries later, Dr Johnson was little better ...”

“... chat-show host, star of a series of travel documentaries, essayist, lyricist: he was for a time a king of all media, even publishing a bestselling novel, Brilliant Creatures, in 1983. His shtick – part rough diamond, part name-dropping highbrow, part fast-talking joker, part self-delighting goon, with a dry, singsong Aussie delivery – was something you ...”