“... In​ the late morning of 30 April 1980, I left my flat at 90 Westbourne Terrace, near Paddington Station, to walk across Kensington Gardens to the Iranian embassy on Princes Gate. I wanted a visa to visit Iran, where the US raid to rescue staff held hostage in its embassy in Tehran had failed disastrously a few days earlier. As I walked, trying to work out what to say to the Iranian press attaché to persuade him to give me a visa, I didn’t at first notice that something odd was happening between the Serpentine and Princes Gate, where people were milling about and the police were setting up a cordon ...”

“... Anthologies are powerful things: movements are launched, periods are parcelled up, writers are made and broken. They are, or want to be, the book world’s performative utterances: defining what they claim only to reflect, they make the things they speak of come to pass. But one last fin-de-siécle anthologising project remains: an anthology of anthology introductions ...”

“... Imagine a dream in which you are climbing a church tower in the dark. Stumbling, you reach out for something to hang on to and find that you are pulling at a bell rope, that the bell is waking up the entire town, and soon other towns far beyond. Within weeks you, the inadvertent bell-ringer, are both famous and infamous, and famous not for a few minutes but for ever ...”

“... What, for the British Isles, is the shape, scope and character of that rich slice of history which was the 16th century? The titles of the textbooks which have defined the period for the late 20th-century successors of Macaulay’s ‘every schoolboy’ tell their own story: Tudor England (S.T. Bindoff, 1950), England Under the Tudors (G.R. Elton, 1955), Tudor England again (John Guy, 1988), branding the age – see J ...”

“... If the past is another country where they do things differently, we may well ask whether we are abroad if we visit the England of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. In September 1528, Henry wrote to Anne: ‘No more to you at this present, mine own darling, for lack of time, but that I would you were in mine arms or I in yours, for I think it long since I kissed you ...”

“... The centre of the book trade in Baghdad is al-Mutanabi Street, which runs between the Tigris and Rashid Street, now shabby and decayed but once the city’s commercial heart. The bookshops are small, and open all the time; on Friday there’s a market, when vendors lay out their books in Arabic and English on mats on the dusty and broken surface of the road ...”

“... It is said that when representatives of the Society of Friends came to Buckingham Palace in 1945 to present a loyal address at the end of World War Two, the king asked who these people were. ‘Some call them Quakers, Your Majesty.’ ‘Oh,’ the king said. ‘I didn’t know that there were any of them left.’ According to the protocols of sociologists of religion, the Quakers are a sect, rather than a denomination, and perhaps after three centuries there shouldn’t have been any left ...”

“... Iraq​ has just had one of its least violent periods since the US invasion in 2003. Islamic State has been defeated: it lost its last town, Rawa, close to the Syrian border, on 17 November, and surviving IS fighters have retreated to hideouts in the western desert. In the past, IS would respond to military setbacks by putting on a show of strength and stepping up its bombing of easy-to-attack civilian targets ...”

“... I belong to the Beardsley period’, said Max Beerbohm, thereby beginning one of criticism’s most imperious habits. The authors of scholarly books such as The Shakespearean Moment, The Pound Era or The Auden Generation are following Beerbohm’s precedent in appropriating a cultural epoch under the name of a single artist. Yet, as D.L. LeMahieu points out, the great majority of their contemporaries had never heard of, still less read, these totemistic figures ...”

“... See Naples and die,’ the old saying has it. But a better motto would be: ‘See Naples and go underground.’ Tourists since the 18th century have enthused over the subterranean wonders of this part of Italy. In 1818, Mary Shelley and her husband visited the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl, and eighty years later, H.G. Wells joined the throng of sightseers at the entrance to the Blue Grotto of Capri ...”

“... Sir Geoffrey Elton’s latest reflections on the state and status of his subject illustrate the Coleridgean maxim that a man is more likely to be right in what he affirms than in what he denies. Arising from lectures delivered, one imagines, off the cuff to an audience at the University of Michigan, they consist for the most part of soundings-off against a rogues’ gallery of ideological and academical types and tendencies which he believes constitute a threat to the proper study and use of the past ...”

“... The Irish actress Harriet Smithson is remembered as an extraordinary episode in the life of Hector Berlioz. Appearing in the 1827 English theatre season in Paris, she took the city by storm – lithographs of her as the mad Ophelia were in every prinitshop window. Ladies of fashion demanded coiffure ‘à la Miss Smithson’ – a black veil with wisps of straw tastefully interwoven amongst the hair ...”

“... The four wars fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria over the past 12 years have all involved overt or covert foreign intervention in deeply divided countries. In each case the involvement of the West exacerbated existing differences and pushed hostile parties towards civil war. In each country, all or part of the opposition have been hard-core jihadi fighters ...”

“... America’s​ first act in the war on Iraq was an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein. In the early hours of the morning of 20 March 2003, forty cruise missiles were launched and bunker-buster bombs dropped on a compound on the outskirts of Baghdad where US intelligence wrongly believed him to be staying. Three years later a US airstrike succeeded in killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaida in Iraq, the organisation that would become Islamic State ...”

“... A pleural effusion​ , fluid trapped between the linings of the lung, had been identified on the CT scan of a 65-year-old man recently diagnosed with lung cancer. ‘Either it’s nothing,’ I told him, ‘an inflammatory response to the biopsy itself, or it’s from the cancer. If the fluid has cancer cells in it, that would change the prognosis ...”