“... was already there. But when it came to the Underground, London did reach out, to the countryside. Edward Watkin, who became chairman of the Metropolitan in 1872, drove the Underground overground for 35 miles, to Aylesbury, in order to further his ambition to build mainline railways linking England and France through a Channel tunnel. He failed in that, but ...”

“... David Lynch’s​ films seemed to come out of nowhere. That’s what he said, anyway. Ideas were ‘little gifts … They just come into your head and it’s like Christmas morning.’ One moment he would be thinking about Bobby Vinton’s 1963 cover of ‘Blue Velvet’; the next thing he knew, a severed ear was lying in a field ...”

“... are facts. When the sun shines it is a fact of God and England is a fact of life. Rania always said she had preferred living in Mile End because the markets were better over there, but at least Westfield was near her now in White City. She was 31. ‘I was born in Egypt 11,426 days ago,’ she told one of her neighbours, pleased with the new app on her ...”

“... his adult life hoping to lead. In the first general election of that year, Powell refused to back Edward Heath, the prime minister who had successfully negotiated Britain’s entry into the EEC. Both Powell and Heath concluded that the former’s lack of support cost the latter his job. In the second election of 1974, Powell went further and effectively told ...”

“... to being compared with Holmes. As Lewis Thomas is none of these things, he will not mind it being said that his opening paragraph is very much in Holmes’s style: ‘I have always had a bad memory, as far back as I can remember. It isn’t so much that I forget things outright, I forget where I stored them. I need reminders, and when the reminders change, as ...”

“... a mine. (He survived, minus a leg.)‘You’re watching the counter-offensive? It’s hard,’ I said to the driver in Russian. He was an older man; he might not speak English, I don’t speak Ukrainian, and I thought he probably wouldn’t mind my speaking the language of the aggressor, which is also one of the languages of Kyiv, unless he objected to the ...”

“... seen poker played is in The Cincinnati Kid, you’ll have watched Steve McQueen lose everything to Edward G. Robinson in one hand of five-card stud; if your family played around the kitchen table when you were a child, it’s likely the game was five-card draw. But if you have played poker for real in the last five years, it will almost certainly have been a ...”

“... An engraved portrait published in Padua in 1650 is captioned ‘Laura Sada Avinionensis’ and is said to be based on a painting in the possession of the family. The abbé Jacques-François de Sade proudly discussed his family connection with her in his Mémoires pour la vie de François Pétrarque (1764). He discovered those documents – the marriage ...”

“... that appears in its first chapter: racial capitalism. The ‘promise of the term’, Arun Kundani said in a lecture in 2020, ‘lies in its apparent bridging of the economic and the cultural, of the class struggle and the struggle against white supremacy, allowing us to understand police and plantation violence as linked to capital accumulation’. Robinson ...”

“... that myself, at the age of four, could identify by name any or all of the coloured plates in Edward Step’s Wayside and Woodland Blossoms ... not content with the English names, I memorised many of the Latin and Greek ones as well. Some of these (at the age of eight) I conceitedly incorporated in a school essay ... The headmaster read the essay aloud to ...”

“... Observer cannot itself improve Lonrho’s image, which is still tarnished in the public mind by Edward Heath’s harsh description of it as representing ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’. The paper’s former editor, David Astor, has said it is hard to see how the Observer can avoid being either dead or ...”

“... generator of war and peace, stability and chaos, prosperity and dearth. As Clausewitz might have said, shooting wars are trade wars carried on by other means. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, for instance, came after the tsar quit the Continental Blockade. Through the Middle Ages, there seems to have been a presumption that unimpeded, if not untaxed, trade ...”

“... and enlivened’ by an innocent love of mischief. She drily adds: ‘Of his modesty, it may be said that though everyone remarked on his reluctance to talk about himself, it is not recorded that anyone ever failed to get him to do so.’ Rider Haggard, in turn, obviously used Selous as a basis for Allan Quatermain in King Solomon’s Mines (1885). Like ...”

“... former retired to Capri to ‘devote himself in private to sexual activities’ and the latter is said to have ‘made a habit of committing incest with his sisters’. The Lives of the Caesars is a series of character studies, and kink is a part of character. But only a part. As he surveys the lives of the twelve men who held sway over the Mediterranean and ...”

“... structure. The Lindbergh kidnapping of 1932 became so huge a national melodrama – it was, said H.L. Mencken, ‘the greatest story since the Resurrection’ – that Edgar Hoover (who co-ordinated the kidnap hunt) became, for the first time, a national figure. Nonetheless, once FDR won the election it seemed clear that Edgar Hoover was finished: the ...”