“... porters much given to drinking and drumming, he set out for the interior. By seizing a single hill on the border between Sierra Leone and Liberia, he and his Thermopylean few were able to close the entire border, and to make many a rich haul as the stupid smugglers came stumbling into the trap. All this was done, however, not for the sake of the ...”

“... of every sketch was people dying.’ Nonetheless, it was undoubtedly a strong influence on Peter Cook (one of the original cast members) and the other three-quarters of the Beyond the Fringe team (Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore), who would go on to present their own take on the nuclear threat, in a sketch called ‘Civil War’.In that ...”

“... the demotic: fuck, balls, cock, cunt – this is Larkin’s equivalent of dialect. Nowadays Peter Reading is offering something similar, inserting into a great variety of verse-forms a language that is coarse, prosey and, some say, as they at first said about Larkin, scarcely the language of poetry at all. Reading’s vernacular England isn’t to be ...”

“... rashly bet that the spire of Dallington Church could be seen from his windows. Morning showed a hill stood in the way. When the cone-shaped folly Fuller had built to defy fact and win his bet was restored in 1961 it proved to be made of mud and stones: it had indeed been put up in a hurry. Although we have been cured of follies on the grand scale by ...”

“... on to become full-blown dissidents with arrests and jail terms to show for it. A new book by Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy attempts to draw a psychological portrait of Putin and finds at least six personas in him, from the ‘history man’ to the ‘free marketeer’ (I would add several more to their list).* The condition has made for a generation of leaders ...”

“... which they want to spend on doing good. But social policy? It is probably unfair to cite Michael Hill’s Understanding Social Policy as an example of why the subject is so likely to produce a yawn. But he manages throughout to reduce subjects of considerable interest to many individuals to a flat, uninteresting, not to say bureaucratic level. His book has ...”

“... Even inferior tradesmen had to be kept at bay. The Great Fire of London – the point at which Peter Thorold’s book begins – led to an outflow of the dingier homeless from the City westward. Some were absorbed in rookeries and Alsatias, packed with thieves and noseless beggars, or in the sizable slum which adjoined Whitehall. There was no welcome for ...”

“... that have helped to unlock the landscape’s latent malignity. Lead-mining by the Bunker Hill Company (‘Uncle Bunker’ to its employees) began in Idaho in the late 1880s. During the 1920s the product was marketed by General Motors as a fuel additive in the form of tetraethyl lead (TEL), to prevent knocking in engines (grain alcohol would have done ...”

“... skull had subsequently been buried with the rest of Browne’s body in the Norwich church of St Peter Mancroft. There follows a disquisition on the life and work of Sir Thomas, a man close to Sebald’s heart, and his nearest precursor in cast of mind, lightly (if arcanely) learned and enormously curious, including the possibility or probability of his ...”

“... Walcott’s extravagance of poetic diction and tendency to verbosity off-putting in the past’ (Peter Porter); ‘I feel that the fuss and the language are not quite justified by the donné’ (Roy Fuller). Derek Walcott has suffered, perhaps more than any other contemporary poet writing in English, from accusations that his work is too showy. Some of the ...”

“... life, most of them rare visitors except for Joan Rodker, in whose flat Doris had lived with Peter, her four-year-old son, while they organised demonstrations and international ‘peace’ meetings. If anyone asked later if she’d been a member of the Communist Party, Doris would give a deep sigh at having to tell it yet again, and explain she was never ...”

“... as ‘misinformation’.)Palantir hasn’t altered its behaviour in the face of such criticism. Peter Thiel, the firm’s Trump-supporting co-founder, talks enthusiastically of melding technological progress with nationalist politics. Alex Karp, Thiel’s business partner and classmate at Stanford, who has a PhD in social theory from the Goethe University ...”

“... reminiscences over the teacups. The story that Mai Zetterling told of her encounter with Peter Sellers and Kingsley Amis, at the time of the filming of Only Two Can Play, moves easily enough from life to fiction. ‘Want to see my Aertexes?’ asks the disgraceful Rex Martin, the Amis offprint. What happens is that world fits within world like a ...”

“... the training session and stretched the shirts over our knees, all the better to roll down Toad Hill in one round movement before dousing the shirts in the industrial swamp at the bottom. The destruction of footballing equipment was beyond the pale: we were too young for Barlinnie Prison, so we got banned to Home Economics instead and were soon the ...”

“... conflict, an admiration for open-hearted combat runs through his writings. The streets of Notting Hill run with blood as the London boroughs fight it out in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, but the shopkeepers feel exhilarated and declare they have at last found something to make life worth living, compared to the stultified ...”