“... for me to draw three eggs than write “three eggs”’ – but then, thanks to the journalist Clive Irving, who enjoyed eating at his house, Deighton’s ‘cookstrips’ began to appear in the Daily Express in 1960 and soon moved to the Observer. They were collected in the mid-1960s as Len Deighton’s Action Cook Book and Où est le garlic? French ...”

“... with wide success. Birmingham, with its Political Union, was one of the more promising localities. Clive Behagg rejects the long-accepted account of concord being favoured by a small-unit industrial structure: big business took a prominent hand in the Union. This may of course make it less surprising that collaboration did not go further; at any rate, it was ...”

“... their strict form, unsparing tone and plain style. ‘It came out in couplets,’ he told Clive Wilmer. ‘I’m not sure why … Once you do something that you’re pleased with, it’s not that you try to repeat it, but it points a way forward to other things.’That November, Gunn spent eight days in New York. Before setting off, he felt ...”

“... On​ 2 November 1921, James Joyce wrote from Paris to his aunt Josephine in Dublin asking if it was ‘possible for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of No. 7 Eccles Street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 off the ground and drop unhurt ...”

“... interactions with LaMDA, and the way they captivated him, reminded the technology journalist Clive Thompson of the 1990s craze for the Tamagotchi, the handheld device that behaves like a plaintive robot pet, endlessly demanding ‘food’ and ‘cleaning’, which its minder – anxious to please – can provide with the press of a button. The ...”

“... like a year. I went to make some money and spent all of it while I was there.Was that when you met James Dickey?He played bluegrass music and he had this lake on his property and was forever showing off his muscles and thighs. At one point he said: ‘Yes, I’m so big, I’m so goddamn big! And no cocksucking English critic’s gonna tell me any ...”

“... unable to raise the revenue to pay the crews. After the Restoration in 1660, both Charles II and James II demonstrated enthusiasm and expertise in nurturing naval expansion. But the Royal Navy’s performance in the Second and Third Dutch Wars was uneven, and political and religious divisions among its officers and men enabled William III and the Dutch fleet ...”

“... digging coal mines. In the British view, India’s destiny was to remain what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson called in Why Nations Fail (2012) an ‘extractive colony’. The Raj was seen at its worst in the hardest times, responding to poor harvests and the resulting famines as reluctantly as the home government did in Ireland. The last large-scale ...”

“... And yet. The diaries begin with his mother’s funeral in 1966. Leonie Orton, Joe’s sister, told James Fox of the Sunday Times: He nearly had mother out of her coffin ... He was picking her head up. ‘What’s all this brown stuff?’; ‘try and get her rings off.’ I said: ‘I don’t want to.’ He said: ‘I do.’ He wanted to see her feet, he was ...”

“... Jacobite, married another one, was imprisoned after Culloden, escaped to France and died in exile. James (‘poor unlucky Jamie’) was huge and clumsy, jilted an heiress, married a penniless English widow and eventually became a Dumfriesshire MP. Alexander began as a soldier and bought a slave plantation in Grenada. Betty never married but stayed at home ...”

“... convey another aspect of Larkin the man, but from those quoted, a less interesting one.) And now James Booth, who teaches English at Hull, and has already written two books on the poet (Philip Larkin: Writer, 1992, and Philip Larkin: The Poet’s Plight, 2005), has composed a brief for the defence of Larkin the man (whom he knew slightly at the ...”

“... attempted destabilisation of Heath and Wilson was taken deadly seriously where it mattered most. Clive Ponting describes the atmosphere inside the Ministry of Defence after Wallace had been jailed: ‘There was never any suspicion that Wallace was making these stories up or that it was totally unfounded and very easy to rubbish. It was very much a matter ...”

“... the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the long-deified Mrs Siddons and very many more. There were peers of the realm, baronets, famous churchmen, a duchess. One hundred or so of these ...”

“... of smack’. Here is Javo, ‘just back from getting off dope in Hobart’, Lou, Selena, Georgie, Clive, Eve, Gracie – and a little boy called ‘the Roaster’ who seems to belong to no one and everyone. There are no introductions, just intimacies that rise sharply above the clatter only to sink back into it. The drama of Monkey Grip is ...”

“... the end not only of Haydon’s career, but of painting in ‘the tradition of Joshua Reynolds, James Barry and Benjamin West’. How convincing this argument is depends on how we view that ‘tradition’. Of the three artists only West, who found a royal patron with the necessary deep pockets and high ceilings, made a career as a history painter. Reynolds ...”