“... the Coast Guard, and the boy’s first nine years were spent in the port town of Elizabeth City, North Carolina. His mother, Wendy, was descended from two passengers on the Mayflower: Priscilla Mullins, ‘the only single woman of marriageable age in the whole first generation of the Plymouth Colony’, and the ship’s cooper, John Alden, whom she chose ...”

“... producing – among other things – an eccentric satire on racism and a Parisian rewrite of Oliver Twist. The initial response to The Roots of Heaven wasn’t universally admiring: the left complained about Gaullism and sentimental humanitarianism, the right sniffed at Gary’s un-French origins by censuring his verb conjugations, and the avant-garde ...”

“... sailed for New York with their baby daughter, Caroline, in search of better wages. They lived on Oliver Street in Lower Manhattan, and Henry found work in a tailor’s shop. Two years after they arrived, he died of typhoid. A widow with a young child, Ann Trow Sommers moved to Chatham Street, a neighbourhood of cheap lodging houses and saloons, and took in ...”

“... Lionel set puzzles and his wife, Margaret, like him a qualified physician, was a keen player; Oliver Penrose, Roger’s older brother, is a physicist and a proficient amateur player; and his younger brother, Jonathan, was a grandmaster and ten times British chess champion. But there was much more to Roger’s puzzling than this. People who know little ...”

“... very long adult life, Victor Sawdon Pritchett seems to have been a happy man. Pritchett’s son, Oliver, later recalled that he and his sister grew up ‘in a word factory’. ‘The handwritten pages, covered in revisions, crossings out, second and third thoughts, and sideways writing in the margins, were given to my mother to type. They would be revised ...”

“... title, including Henry VIII, Good Queen Bess (the pirates’ patron), Charles I and, not least, Oliver Cromwell. The war in question is known to us as the War of Jenkins’s Ear, thus dubbed by Thomas Carlyle a century later. The extraordinary thing is that it was more than eight years since Captain Robert Jenkins of the brig Rebecca had had his ear cut off ...”

“... called Kitty Hawk, seven hundred miles from Dayton, on a chain of islands and sandbars off North Carolina known as the Grand Banks. Wilbur wrote to the head of the Weather Bureau station on Kitty Hawk and had a letter back from the former postmaster, Bill Tate, who was to become a good friend and helper to the brothers. The issue wasn’t only the wind ...”

“... For one thing, new glasshouses would have to be on or near the same latitude (approx 51 degrees north), as they are in Holland, to make the most of natural light. For another, buyers for the big UK supermarket chains can squeeze a mega-grower like Thanet Earth as hard as any other producer. A larger query hanging over hydroponic growing in the UK is quite ...”

“... proportions. Like all the best whodunnits, it is a slow burner. A group of clever young men – Oliver Letwin, John Redwood, William Waldegrave, among others – gather in various restaurants and country house hotels to bat around ideas for reforming the financing of local governance, encouraged and provoked by their mentor, Lord Rothschild. They were much ...”

“... on and interprets, as well as mapping the historical geography of the poem: its antipathy to the North, associated with Charles raising his standard at Nottingham, with Scotland and with Strafford’s Yorkshire. Satan’s association with ‘glistering spires’ implies Royalist Oxford, and Pandemonium is the Divinity School in the Bodleian Library, where ...”

“... spy, I wanted my character to have a legend that was so copper-bottomed, so strong and sure, like Oliver Twist’s, say, or Humbert Humbert’s, or mine, that it wouldn’t just fool the public but very nearly fool its author. I looked at old photographs from this school, and from the secondary school I placed him at, St Aloysius College in Highgate, and ...”

“... fever and dysentery.’The potato crop failed again in 1848, this time mainly in the west and the north-east. In London, in an early instance of effective spin-doctoring, there was a move to insist that the Famine was over, and that any remaining problems could be handled locally. ‘What shocks,’ O Grada writes in The Great Irish Famine, ‘is the size of ...”

“... impulsive tics and Korsakoff’s (Sergei, that is) amnesia, both recently made famous again by Oliver Sacks; Creutzfeld-Jacob disease, just to bring us right up to the mad cow. (No woman – at least at this level – seems to have had anything named after her.) A name announces only the dénouement, however: it does not convey the extraordinary ...”

“... and Willesden Green Station on the Metropolitan Line. This was one of several neighbourhoods in North-West London to which prospering Jews tended to migrate from East London in the 1920s and 1930s, the most notorious being Golders Green, otherwise known as Goldberg Green or the Polish Corridor. We were to live in Teignmouth Road till 1940, so it is ...”

“... right.31 May. A late birthday present, a mug dated January 1889, commemorates the gift by Colonel North of the ruins of Kirkstall Abbey to the then borough of Leeds. There is a picture of Kirkstall and the inscription: ‘Built in 1147. Destroyed by Oliver Cromwell in 1539.’ This was what most people believed in Leeds ...”