“... Morris, a genuine sorcerer’s apprentice who more or less accidentally more or less shut down North America. I call in at the newest local arcade for a fix and update. And find an oddly-slanted world-view with gigabytes lavished on witless graphics, millions of yen for development of which about 11p goes to the translator: ‘CHASE A DREADFUL CRIMER BEING ...”

“... like Bolivia or Paraguay. De Gaulle said that Chile was ‘the pilot country of Latin America’. John Gunther wrote in 1967 that Chile was ‘one of the most civilised countries in the world’, and that the general line of government was ‘roughly that of the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt or even the British Labour Party’. There is not a hint of such ...”

“... Victorian Minds, presented a throng of thinkers, in a celebration of cerebration. And her study of John Stuart Mill suggested that different states of mind might dwell within the same body. The result of this approach is a rich and unusual brand of intellectual history: more interested in the typical and representative second-rate figure than the transcendent ...”

“... for aspirants to literary fame to hack their way to a modest living. At this propitious moment, a North-countryman in his early twenties who had defied sound counsel to become a writer met an Anglo-Welshman – a native of London, six years his senior – in the same line. They lived for a time in adjacent lodgings. For a week they subsisted on cheese and ...”

“... after his father had succeeded in wasting most of the family estates (around Cromarty, in the north of Scotland), and presumably because of this, Sir Thomas and his younger brother imprisoned their father in an upper room for five days. When the father gained his freedom he instituted legal proceedings, but nothing much came of them, and eventually all ...”

“... evasion element in the returns on salt tax, the differential height of conscripts from the North and from the South – almost everything on which data are available, or even imaginable. Beneath this welter of information the reader, especially the average literary reader, may well feel Gradground out of comprehension: the issue of ‘the way of ...”

“... Marian frame – as an illustration of a popular story from the Apocrypha, which has the infant John the Baptist, in flight from Herod’s executioners, come across Christ on his flight into Egypt. Though never was Egypt like this. Maybe the trigger for the temple of boulders was a line from the Song of Songs: ‘My dove in the clefts of rocks (in ...”

“... by 1943. If his books now end up in charity shops alongside discarded copies of the F-Plan Diet or John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, it’s because the shimmering and peaceable ‘England’ he promised is not, after all, to be found waiting at the end of a deserted lane, or, if it were, we’d never know, because we’d be stuck in a traffic ...”

“... been able fully to grasp the force of an argument made by David Harris QC on behalf of Rosie: ‘John Locke’s assertion that "every man has a property in his own person. This no body has any right to but himself” . . . is difficult to apply in the case of conjoined twins.’ I have looked again at the photograph on page 38 to try to find some trace of ...”

“... pioneer works as S.E. Rasmussen’s astonishingly innovative London: The Unique City (1934) and John Summerson’s now-classic Georgian London (1945). So influential have these books become that, in retrospect, their novelty and audacity are hard to appreciate. But at the time of publication, they were milestones in the history of architecture, showing how ...”

“... out that Yale had named many of its colleges after slaveholders and pro-slavery leaders, including John C. Calhoun College in 1933 and Samuel F.B. Morse College in 1961, and noted that in 1831 Yale officials had helped to block the establishment of a college for Black Americans in New Haven. They called for Yale ‘to acknowledge how it has benefited from the ...”

“... the City Government and the New York Police were doing something right. It is easy to forget that John Lindsay, still burdened with one of the most harshly negative public reputations among American political figures, was hailed in 1968 as the politician of the future, the man who had kept the city cool and who offered hope that the liberal experiment for the ...”

“... Spanish American literature, finally to reach the enormous audiences they deserve. Already, John Fowles in a Guardian essay has used the Chronicle to great effect as a prism through which to see the battle for the Malvinas. No doubt the Sun will shortly advise its readers to do the same. No doubt Sandy Woodward is a fan of the tale of Colonel Aureliano ...”

“... had acquaintances in the literary world (her correspondents included H.G. Wells, Bryher, H.D. and John Cowper Powys), most of her life was lived in obscurity, and her friendships were mainly epistolary ones. Her aversion to having her picture taken and her reluctance to submit to interviews (she believed that readers should ‘keep their illusions’ about ...”

“... to the Spanish courts viewed this exotic society, in which, as late as the 15th century, King John II of Castile had a Muslim bodyguard, and where, throughout the late Middle Ages, Spanish kings employed Jews as tax collectors and even confidential advisers, is an intriguing question. For by the end of the 14th century Spain was an anomaly in its ...”