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“... a holiday diary kept in childhood, figured in the Tribute to W.H. Auden organised not long ago by Stephen Spender.) In general, the facts in the book are effectively deployed, but they are sometimes insufficient and uncertain. Mr Osborne’s, of course, was not an easy task. Like quite a few artists, Auden lived off rumour, and was the cause of rumour in ...”

“... In Padua, on 20 January 1976, a young girl called Margherita Magello was repeatedly stabbed and left for dead. She was discovered by Massimo Carlotto, a 19-year-old student radical and member of Lotta Continua, who tried to save her, and, in doing so, got covered in her blood. She died, he was arrested and, a pawn in the struggle between Lotta Continua and the police, was tried for her murder ...”

“... back at least as far as the beginning of the century. In a paper published in 1913, the gifted young anthropologist Robert Hertz, soon to be killed in the First World War, studied the cult of Saint Besse as an expression of the values of an Alpine community, ‘taking us inside the consciousness, otherwise so distant and so closed, of the mountain ...”

“... television and I first suggested it to the BBC in 1975, but without success. Then, early in 1978, Stephen Gilbert commissioned it for a series called ‘The Other Side’, also being made from Pebble Mill, Birmingham. The immediate problem was to dramatise the relationship between Great-grandfather and Maxwell, which is merely reported in the story. It was ...”

“... of wire, jewellery and false hair). Thanks to a lawsuit brought in 1612 by their son-in-law, Stephen Belott, over the non-payment of the dowry allegedly promised with their daughter, Mary, in 1604, we know a good deal more about the Mountjoy family’s affairs than we do about those of their lodger, whose bit-part role as a go-between in the marriage ...”

“... a philosophical idiom in saying so. Like philosophy, anti-philosophy is for the philosophers. Stephen Toulmin’s work over the past half-century shares sensibilities and rhetorical styles with the later Wittgenstein and (more recently) with Rorty: there’s something wrong with modern academic philosophy (especially the philosophy of morals and of ...”

“... Economic growth means that local traditions have been sapped at the same time as frustrated young job-seekers, ‘crowded into decaying and often primitive slums’, are being bombarded by ‘cassettes, compact discs and videos glorifying Islamic history’, delivered by an ‘Islamist international’ shamelessly exploiting Western technological ...”

“... any more, there’s a complete breakdown in the authority of teachers and parents. Children as young as eight, nine and ten are joining gangs, running wild – using the intifada as an excuse.’ Iyyad tells me about a man from a village near Ramallah who was strangled by ‘intifada activists’ only days after being released from an Israeli prison. ‘He ...”

“... famine of 1932-3. The estimates made as long ago as 1946 by Lorimer, and in the Seventies by Stephen Wheatcroft and myself, proved to be too low, but many estimates by Western historians were too high. The present state of our knowledge about these grim consequences of Stalinism is succinctly summarised in Alec Nove’s 14-page chapter in Stalinist ...”

“... a fluster, because the police have just phoned to say a gang of book thieves is on the way and the Stephen Kings are unprotected) says that ‘one can stand in certain parts of Dewsbury and see upwards of sixty mill chimneys at a time.’ My mother’s second husband was a Yorkshireman who had started work at 16, sweeping the floors at a small mill ...”

“... education which encouraged his precocious archaeological and linguistic interests. Even as a young schoolboy he was showing a taste for Apocryphal texts: first out of a perverse delight in their obscurity and eccentricity, but soon with a genuine fascination which was to endure, and to make him the leading British scholar in a subject that was a very ...”

“... description for A Terrible Country, Keith Gessen’s loosely autobiographical account of a not-so-young Russian-American graduate student’s ambivalent year in Putin’s Russia. The novel’s hero – also named Andrei – is similarly torn. From his home in New York he promises his older brother – who has suddenly fled to London after getting on the wrong ...”

“... a barn owl with a mouse in its beak, caught by Eric Hosking in 1948, a brown rat photographed by Stephen Dalton as it jumped from a bin in 1983. Curiosity about the look of exotic tribes was not limited to pictures from abroad. The four performers of the Abbot’s Bromley Horn Dance, taken by Benjamin Stone in 1899, stare at the camera as grimly as Papuan ...”

“... At the height of Empire, and of the literature of Empire, J.K. Stephen looked forward to a time When there stands a muzzled stripling,     Mute, beside a muzzled bore, When the Rudyards cease from Kipling     And the Haggards Ride no more. The Haggards have ridden rather precariously since the decline of Empire, if at all ...”

“... Nusrat Raza, a young Pakistani woman, was seen by a passer-by as a ‘great ball of fire coming down the stairs’ of her house. Raza, an asylum seeker who lived in Bradford, had recently been told that the Home Office had refused her claim to stay in the country. At least 221 asylum seekers, refugees and migrant workers have died violent deaths in the UK in the past 17 years ...”