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“... that surprisingly donnish genre (the English tutor at Christ Church in the 1950s and 1960s, J.I.M. Stewart, wrote detective fiction as Michael Innes, and Edmund Crispin took his pseudonym from one of his novels) could be regarded as Murdoch without the metaphysics. But of course Murdoch without the metaphysics would not quite be Murdoch. Her chief contribution ...”

“... with the idea of buying each of its readers a printer to print the newspaper for themselves at home. The internet was well established by 1997, but usage hadn’t taken off. Some newspapers had basic websites, but few visited them. The dominant mode of accessing the internet was the slow and inconvenient dial-up method; few ...”

“... be called the pre-revolutionary period, the quarter-century between the death in 1891 of Charles Stewart Parnell, the doomed founder and leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, and 1916, deserves a deeper investigation, ‘at the personal level of individual lives’, than has yet been carried out. He is rightly wary of first-hand accounts written after the ...”

“... obviously political. He belonged to a social crowd that didn’t intersect much with mine: Home Counties, landed gentry, a stockbroker father somehow involved – the customary expensive vagueness – ‘in finance’, a grand house I could only imagine and probably in those days envied. These boys all knew one another from somewhere else, fraternised ...”

“... fortune had collapsed as a result of the coal strike, forcing the Bells to abandon her favourite home, Rounton Grange. Her beloved half-brother, Hugo, had died of typhoid contracted in South Africa. King Feisal, whom she had always idolised, found it politic to avoid her, in order to keep the militant nationalists quiet. Her health was poor, and ...”

“... what it is, Leibniz says, is in fact to imagine another world entirely. If I had chosen to stay at home today instead of going to the library, then we would all be living in a different ‘possible world’ – a world that contains not me, freely choosing a day in the library, but someone else, exactly like me except for deciding to spend the day at ...”

“... To ensure its survival, and to avoid imposing an intolerable burden on the British population at home, the Empire was usually defended and policed by armies recruited from among each colony’s indigenous peoples. In South Africa, the Khoi-Khoi (Hottentots) were formed into the Cape Mounted Rifles to be used against the Xhosa (Kaffirs). In ...”

“... no doubt that Clancy knows the back lots and the business. For his B-list screenwriting client Stewart Stern, Clancy pulled off a coup by getting him big bucks and a big assignment: Rebel without a Cause. Afterwards, according to Clancy, Jack Warner pushed him against the wall – ‘He positively fire breathes Brut aftershave’ – and tore him off a ...”

“... African migrants coming to the continent potential doctors, engineers, or revolutionaries in their home countries?’ And: ‘How different Africa would be if all that energy expended to leave the continent were turned inward.’ Youthful vigour would seem a slippery variable. But it is a spectre in Smith’s book: both the overproduction of African youth, and ...”

“... disco wholeheartedly. Alan Jones and Jussi Kantonen describe an occasion in July 1979 at the home stadium of the Chicago White Sox baseball team when thousands of disco records were set alight while the crowd chanted ‘Disco sucks, Disco sucks!’ The 1989 edition of the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music describes disco as ‘a dance fad of the ...”

“... likely to have appealed to the most heroic figure in Irish life and literature since Charles Stewart Parnell: politics, that is, proposing a parade of rascality, hilarity, treachery, hypocrisy, audacity, idealism, always shot through by moments of splendid courage and always ending in bitter tears? If Dear Reader will allow me to vanish for three minutes ...”

“... everyone knew that Callaghan, Jenkins, George Brown, Healey, Castle, Crosland, Shore, Benn, Stewart and Crossman were political heavyweights – while the only real heavyweight now besides Blair is Gordon Brown. Parliament’s weakness is best gauged by the way the number of MPs keeps creeping up – from 615 before the war to 659 now. America, with ...”

“... haunted Boston, devouring and copying the treasures in the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, even getting a little basic training at night from the New School of Design. Later he would promulgate more lies about having studied at the more prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, or graduated from Brown University. Daily life ...”

“... He also found a new job as secretary of the United Liberal Club, which welcomed both Liberals and Home Rulers at a time when Isaac Butt’s leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party was giving way to that of Charles Stewart Parnell. The club, in Dawson Street, was a place to meet and smoke and drink and discuss ...”

“... decay. The litany of names reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious ...”