“... African story he told were shown to be without empirical foundation. But none of this mattered. Henry Louis Gates got it right when he said in a 1998 interview that Roots is a ‘work of the imagination’. This may be the reason it captured the imagination of millions and why genealogical work began a new phase of expansion. New organisations were ...”

“... around the subject, sometimes a short walk, sometimes a full-scale peregrination in two parts (Henry V, The Best Years of Our Lives) and once, for sentimental reasons, three parts (Monsieur Verdoux). The prose is nicely adapted to allow for both humour and gravity, and for something in between, a wry or sombre thoughtfulness: a surprising instrument alike ...”

“... will all be going to hell. That’ll answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself ...”

“... I can feel that I am there, my heart beats faster, and it seems but a moment until the retiring bell cuts short my dreams.What is the substance of the novel? Is it the same as the substance of those letters that went winging their way between continents? Something more confidential than mere information, more intimate. The letters find their purpose during ...”

“... no reason to think that Orwell was fundamentally different from Mark Twain or George Eliot or O. Henry or Rebecca West. Certainly his motives for writing under a name other than his own seem straightforward enough. He was writing about his life among the ‘lowest of the low’, and his lower-upper-middle-class family might be embarrassed by his ...”

“... moiling was still ahead of him.) Fifty years later, we are all, in Berryman’s sardonic words, ‘Henry House’, all ‘the steadiest man on the block’, and the stronger the reaction against the confessional poets, the more prominence accrues to Bishop’s self-exemption, the more stark and heroic and solitary her small output seems, the more remarkable ...”

“... muliebre’) was an element in a nun’s attire – because he had read a satire on Sir Henry Vane which said ‘They talk’t of his having a Cardinalls Hat,/They’d send him as soon an Old Nuns Twat’ – is something of an old chestnut, but there are some other less well-known juicy bits here. The late 18th-century use of the word ...”

“... issued with explosive-packed sky rockets to be let off in case of any disturbance. At 5 a.m. the bell of St George’s Church, Southwark, began tolling and spectators started to stream silently towards it through the dark and freezing streets. By the time it stopped an hour later, every vantage point around the jail was packed solid. The impending execution ...”

“... products but also controlled the diffusion of knowledge about new technologies: the attendees at Bell Labs’ first industry-wide demonstration of the transistor in 1951 were vetted by the Department of Defence. Transistors were particularly important in the following decade because they were integrated into long-range missile systems.Space and nuclear ...”

“... for determining specific gravities; all manner of timekeepers; a universal joint; a diving bell; a bullet-proof vest; a ‘sailing chariot’; a velocipede; improvements to the camera obscura, oil lamps and musical instruments, and in techniques for staining marble, printing maps and milling apples; and a formal method for producing an endless supply ...”

“... a beat. I think it must be Thursday, she says, because he has to go into town every day.My father Henry is tall and thin, with a tweed sports jacket. His black hair is slicked back with a patent solution. He wears spectacles and looks very intelligent, in my opinion. He brings home the Manchester Evening News.He brings home the smell on his coat of autumn ...”

“... most staunch supporters in the 1930s. Few were more unwavering in their support than his brother Henry, yet even he complained the previous year that ‘sometimes you remind me of a gentleman in full evening dress and white gloves attempting to put something right with the kitchen plumbing without soiling his attire.’ It comes as no surprise when the great ...”

“... in its detail: undergraduates on night fire-watching duty taking turns to stay awake in the bell tower of Christ Church, the smell of blackout curtains, the ominous poetry of the blackout itself, the eight-second interval between trucks in a military convoy, with a press of bicycles behind the last one. This section is written in the first ...”

“... had to be warned off, kept at bay. I desired the hitherto unattainable – to be left alone: what Henry James once described as ‘uncontested possession of the long, sweet, stupid day’: that peace to which no living creature has a natural right. Yes, for a time I was decidedly neurotic on the subject of my friends. I even imagined a kinship with Dorothy ...”

“... key to the appearance of a writer’s work in another language; it may make their fortune: Anthea Bell (Englishing Sebald) and Ann Goldstein (voicing Elena Ferrante) propelled the authors to cult status beyond their own shores. Like a shrub moved to a sunnier position, writers may thrive when transplanted. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Human Acts have won ...”