“... shine. The phones still charge. Does it matter that the old electricity suppliers of eastern and north-west England and the English Midlands, the coal-fired power stations of Kingsnorth, Ironbridge and Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the turbine shops at Hams Hall, the oil and gas stations on the Isle of Grain, Killingholme, Enfield and Cottam are the property of E.ON of ...”

“... So it comes as a bigger shock than the salmonella scare (Edwina Currie, 1988) or the BSE scare (John Selwyn Gummer, 1990) to hear the latest strand in the table talk: that the era of endless food is winding down.This belief is new. Until recently the discussion was largely about quality. Quantity and availability only entered the picture when we wondered ...”

“... chemistry and then physics, and also took a seminar (only one other student enrolled) with Alfred North Whitehead on the Principia Mathematica, which Whitehead had written with Bertrand Russell twenty years earlier. However, once Oppenheimer had decided on physics he was champing at the bit to be ‘near the centre’ of the discipline. In the Anglophone ...”

“... family in Portsmouth. It is worth remembering that these were the years when, further to the north, Wordsworth was fascinated by starving children, beggars, aged shepherds and broken veterans of the French war. Copeland, whose essay in Jane Austen in Context is accompanied by others of comparable value and interest, turns up again as the editor of Sense ...”

“... eat my hat. Act One: Little Eunice Waymon, a piano prodigy according to her teacher in Tryon, North Carolina, destined to be the first internationally celebrated black classical pianist. She lived in a hard-working family; her mother was a Methodist minister, her father a handyman before becoming a preacher and then an invalid. Eunice’s talent was ...”

“... The novelist Dorothy Richardson, a film critic for Close Up, saw women with infants at a cinema in North London on a Monday afternoon in July 1927, their ‘faces sheened with toil’, ‘figures of weariness at rest’. The notion that the cinema might be a sanctuary for mothers persists in the current fashion for weekday mother-and-baby screenings – though ...”

“... are kept down, but Frayn takes us inside, backstage, closer to the noises off. He also trawls the North London streets where his parents started out, trying to get a measure of his origins and to work out where to place himself – or his young self – socially. ‘Lower-middle class’, the answer he usually gives when asked, is an over-simplification. The ...”

“... and a maelstrom of demolition and construction surged on our doorstep. The whole of the area north and east of Liverpool Street Station was slowly engulfed as Broadgate, a Leviathan even among London’s new mega-developments, advanced nearer and nearer. I would wake to find that there was nowhere to buy dinner that day; the local butcher’s and a row ...”

“... what Alford calls ‘formidable ambition and startling ignorance’, an expedition to find the north-east passage set off in 1553, armed with a letter from the king extolling the universal benefits of a shared treasury of the high seas. The mariners were briefed on how to manage alien encounters: the native should be treated warily yet courteously and ...”

“... It was completed some time after 1607 and stands in the sacristy of a church in Bassano Romano, north of Rome. Visitors can compare it with a full-size cast of the statue Michelangelo made from the second block, the original being in the Roman church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Michelangelo normally worked from the front of a block and probably hadn’t ...”

“... But then again, he thinks, perhaps he’s wrong, and anxiously calls the next chapter ‘North Korea?’ He also suffers from mood swings. We leave him ‘weeping, weeping, weeping endlessly’ before encountering him the next day, right as rain: ‘This morning at four thirty, it’s a pleasure to settle back in on my zafu.’Yoga, he feels, gives ...”

“... War. There were Kipling’s vivid stories of Sussex life through the ages, and then there was John Buchan’s The Path of the King, tracing ancestral virtues and vices from a Viking prince to Abraham Lincoln, taking in the depravities of Titus Oates. Even before reading these quite gripping books, we were vaguely acquainted, through schools, comics and ...”

“... good land had attracted Government interest. In 1905 the Colonial Secretary asked him to go out to North America to report on the labour colonies set up by the Salvation Army in the hope of making men out of Britain’s derelicts, and to consider whether this was an idea on which the Government could build. General Booth’s Army was but one of many such ...”

“... mark is all over this novel, not just in the muscular, shouldering prose style – the style of John Self – but in Ripley’s rich tangle of adolescent preoccupations, his Charles Highway-like obsession with bodily products (‘matutinal lungbung’ in particular), with his own appearance (‘My tasty eyes ... Much is the womanly bullshit that has been ...”

“... at 10 Rillington Place, West London, an address later notorious as the home of the mass murderer John Christie. The same Home Secretary, Maxwell Fyfe, by now a ‘charlatan’ with ‘all the arrogance of the truly ignorant’, contended that there had been no miscarriage of justice and was content to believe that by an odd coincidence two murderers had ...”