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“... The ‘great ship’ was the British Empire; the words are those of the imperial historian Jack Gallagher. Noel Annan believed that the ‘peaceful divestment of the empire’ was ‘the most successful political achievement of Our Age’. The main actors on the British side all came out of it pretty chuffed, too. They must have been encouraged in this ...”

“... cover his own basic dullness. He remembered the visits Wilde made to his grandfather, Ford Madox Brown: Mr Wilde was a quiet individual who came every Saturday, for years, to tea … Wilde would sit in a high-backed armchair, stretching out one hand a little towards the blaze of the wood fire on the hearth and talking of the dullest possible things to Ford ...”

“... prose.) If everybody loved Penman on Paul Schrader, on James Garner, scraping the formaldehyde off Jack Nicholson, then the Roeg improvisation hit the wall. The advantage of deadline delivery in the old punk days was that pieces went straight into print. That’s what, looking at this collection, this fat blue chunk of his life, Penman missed. The tarted-up ...”

“... films we have experienced. And it’s not where we were when we heard about the assassination of Jack Kennedy, but what we were watching: television. Home alone, or straining the neck to look at a wall-mounted set in a half-empty restaurant, we were in thrall to waveringly remote prints of reality. Meanwhile, on the same afternoon, the nominated ...”

“... churning up dust. In vast, windowless sheds specialising in Logistics. In geometric stacks of red, brown and blue containers: HAMBURG SÜD, HANJIN, MOL. Like a monumental Paul Klee hammered out in steel. In Thatcher’s day it seemed a ground-level manifestation of what I took to be her vision of enterprise: deranged scams, small businesses wiped out. And the ...”

“... War nostalgia. Item: the Weekend Guardian’s spring fashion issue, with Alexa Chung, the nut-brown-haired television presenter, posed to look like a figure from 1940s propaganda posters – Women of Britain, Go to the Shops. Item: those creepy Home Office billboards – ‘You Have The Right NOT To Remain Silent’ – copied from that ubiquitous ‘Keep ...”

“... life, growth and decay, and particularly of wood and lumber and mulch, of red and green and brown leaves. Of ‘a house eats up the wood that made it,’ of ‘We live, two trees,’ of ‘the leaves light up, still green, this afternoon,/and burn to frittered reds,’ of ‘the mind, which is also flesh’, of the scriptural ‘all flesh is grass, and ...”

“... the cabinet and outside it ready to help the prime minister along. And so much nodding, and from Jack Straw in particular, still nodding on the front bench today like a dog in the back window of a Fiesta. The newspapers fall for Butler’s smooth speaking even when they know how specious it is. One of his predecessors as master of University College, Oxford ...”

“... was a fishmonger. In the early 1920s he had had an offer from a friend in the film industry, Jack Hyams, to become a partner. Had he accepted he’d have owned a large share in Gaumont-British, but he hadn’t been prepared to take the risk of moving into unknown territory. Within his familiar trade he had done reasonably well in a modest way, owning two ...”

“... This van (there were to be three others in the course of the next twenty years) was originally brown but by the time it had reached the Crescent it had been given a coat of yellow. Miss S. was fond of yellow (‘It’s the Papal colour’) and was never content to leave her vehicles long in their original trim. Sooner or later she could be seen moving ...”

“... working classes with unusual seriousness, he was deeply repelled by its shallow I’m-all-right-Jack materialism. His proposals for somehow uniting the cultures and releasing the creative energies which would transform them never amounted to much, but his loud cry of double alienation struck a chord with a whole new post-war generation of ...”

“... in decline. Steffens, especially, became a sort of literary and political godfather to young Jack Reed when he graduated from Harvard and hit the New York radical scene in 1910, introducing him to old Muckrakers and, equally helpfully, to their editors. ‘Big and growing, handsome outside and beautiful inside, when that boy ... came to New York, it ...”

“... talked about the English tendency to overlook the importance of the final result, as if what Tom Brown learned at school about the spirit of the game being more important than winning or losing still applied. Yet one must concede that the English take a certain philosophical pleasure in the art of losing. British football managers insist that their players ...”

“... almost all the colonies, protectorates and overseas dependencies that had been under the Union Jack. The confluence between colonialism and immigration – the theme of Patel’s book – was initially a joining of two currents of displacement. The first was the torrent of British emigrants moving to the empire. A 1901 survey found that nearly three ...”

“... containing the remains, among thousands of others, of my great-uncle Frank and Kipling’s son Jack, though who can be sure exactly where they lie? (The identification of Jack’s grave in the cemetery at St Mary’s Advanced Dressing Station is still contested.) Twenty-five years before I went to Loos for the centenary ...”