“... he was everyone’s pal. After he’d gone to his happy hunting ground, the people of his home-town, Dampier, clubbed together to raise a statue to his memory. He now has two memorials. The episodes strung together here are the kind that circulate by word of mouth in isolated communities. One well-meaning sheila (‘woman’) attempts to burn some ...”

“... and stay in the soil for years as a threat to farm animals. If Koch could do all these things with home-made apparatus, there is surely nothing to prevent a contemporary terrorist, with the results of more than a hundred years of research on anthrax at his disposal, from setting up a spore factory and scaling up the procedure. According to the book of ...”

“... on seeing a production of Vanbrugh’s The Relapse at the National Theatre. The actor playing Lord Foppington, the madly vain ‘man of fashion’, was highly talented; but he (or perhaps more likely the director) had decided to make Foppington to some degree a ‘queen’, and the result was that, brilliant though the performance was in many ways, it ...”

“... backward’, his son asserted, and was generally characterised by a mulish refusal to stir from home. ‘He was . . . timid and reclusive, and he shrank from all avoidable companionship with others.’ It comes as a surprise, then, to learn of Henry’s sociable and venturesome youth. His father, Thomas Gosse, was an unsuccessful miniaturist, who made a ...”

“... occasion enclosing ‘a modest gift to keep you warm’, and on another ‘dried dates from our home country’. He also sent her ‘everything I have on my computer so that you may contribute to the public statements that we are preparing to release on the occasion of the tenth anniversary … of the blessed attacks on New York and Washington.’ Bin Laden ...”

“... presumably with the technical expertise required of grands projets: stock in the Dream Team, Lord Foster and the Skidmore Owings & Merrill group went up, while stock in Daniel Libeskind and others fell. But also, implicitly, one should be an echt New Yorker, and here Foster went down (maybe out), Libeskind up a bit, while the Dream Team, SOM and the ...”

“... enclosure of local common land. In 1864, a disturbing letter arrived for John Edward Dorington, lord of the manor, and his son: you are robing the working class of the Parish and their offsprings for ever in fact you are not Gentlemen but robbers and vagabonds, however if it is enclosed you shall never receive any benefit thereby as there are several on ...”

“... The Dupins lived in a splendid mansion near the Palais Royal in Paris, and – for a second home –bought the Château de Chenonceau, the former residence of the courtier Diane de Poitiers. Louise Dupin’s salon was one of the centres of the French Enlightenment, and her husband wrote a treatise, Oeconomiques (1745), that anticipated the calls of ...”

“... state of the union with what amounted to a free pass. The Yanks of Oxford were accustomed to going home and taking up a lot of available space in the American academy, in the American media and in American politics or diplomacy. Yet for this contingent, the whole experience had become deeply and abruptly fraught. They were far from ...”

“... spokesperson most often put up, particularly on television, is the junior minister at the Home Office, Hazel Blears. With a name that combines both blur and smear and which would have delighted Dickens the lady in question has always shown herself to be an unwavering supporter of Mr Blair, though lacking those gestures in the direction of humanity ...”

“... owned on Mickle Street in Camden, New Jersey, or jotted down later from memory, when he returned home to his wife and family or to his desk at the bank that employed him. Whitman very seldom acknowledges that his conversations are being recorded. But he makes it clear that as a form of biography he prefers this method to anything more studied, more given to ...”

“... listens to guns and bombs, that the Easter Rising and the War of Independence achieved what the Home Rulers at Westminster could not, that IRA guns and Semtex would force the Brits out – have generally held sway over those who argued that violence only polarised the situation and delayed British withdrawal. John Major and Patrick Mayhew have not grasped ...”

“... against racial discrimination. It said that Dr King had been arrested seven times and his home bombed, that black students in Montgomery, Alabama had been expelled after singing ‘My country, ’tis of thee’ on the steps of the State capitol. The advertisement named no names among the forces it criticised. But a commissioner of the city of ...”

“... the largest, to their feudal landlord. Most peasants were enserfed – that is, bound to the lord in the place where they were born – and paid taxes in kind, in the form of compulsory labour in the lord’s fields, with the family having to surrender their best beast to their ...”

“... Judge, I saw him rove    Dispensing good. Burns is referring to Barskimming, seat of the judge Lord Glenlee, as he finally became. At different times this estate extracted the word ‘romantic’ or ‘romance’ from a group of people, a remarkable chorus, club or consensus composed of Robert Burns, David Hume and Henry Cockburn, while the nearby estate ...”