“... or cowardice in the faces opposite them. Tube poetry between the world wars, from F.S. Flint and Richard Aldington to Eliot and Auden, is a monument to triteness. None of these writers took the trouble to grasp the experience of underground travel in its specificity, as Hitchcock did, as Gissing and James had done. They rendered it as an unvarying condition ...”

“... cruise was led by an American whose identity is redacted, but the editor, Larry Siems, thinks it may have been the navy reservist Richard Zuley, identified in court documents as the Special Projects Team chief for Slahi’s interrogations at Guantánamo, a retired Chicago cop now working for the aviation police at O’Hare ...”

“... the history of British India with the story of the Lows and their immediate kith and kin. Readers may sigh at the author’s promise of an ‘epic saga of love, war, intrigue and treachery’. Mount has written some historical fiction: in Jem (and Sam) he invented a 17th-century forebear, Jeremiah Mount, who rivalled Pepys as a diarist, and he has Wolf-Halled ...”

“... in 1883 of an English translation – a project fronted by the Orientalising self-promoter Richard Burton – there have been a great number of illustrated versions. To many, the Kāmasūtra’s connection with India is almost incidental. Most do not know what the text as a whole is like: the best-known portions take up only one of its seven ...”

“... final few weeks and his death, ‘this difficult, tedious, painful enterprise’. That May, Noseworthy had called Gunn from Palm Springs – where he was living with his new boyfriend, the porn star Richard Locke – and told him he had Kaposi’s sarcoma. A few days later, he arrived in San Francisco to get ...”

“... about the forensic relevance of bones, speaks to the difficulty of assessing how old a bone may be (as she says, ‘setting up a murder investigation based on Roman remains is not likely to result in a solved case’). The speed with which the flesh of a corpse melts from the bone varies greatly depending on temperature, soil type and scavenger ...”

“... they went through 1400 metres of coral before hitting a basalt base.While recent threats to reefs may make them seem fragile, they have existed for most of the past 500 million years. There are gaps in the geological record where ocean chemistry and climate didn’t favour reef growth, but isolated corals have always survived, allowing reefs to return. And ...”

“... editor-presenter of the arts’ he rates the accolade of his own Spitting Image. Lynn Barber may have famously delineated his ‘awful smug matey blokiness’ in the pages of the Independent on Sunday, but perhaps that only demonstrates what an inviting target Bragg has become. As a character in Kingdom come (1980) explains, ‘the rules are simple ...”

“... yellow sands’, in which a succession of voices discourse on the fairy painter and parricide Richard Dadd (odd that no one comments on the singular aptness of his surname). Dadd, having taken his father for the devil, went at him in Cobham Park with a spring-knife – a weapon more effective than Christy Mahon’s loy. Poor dad – or, if you like, poor ...”

“... in the spring of 1975 there was little left of the old society. Cambodia had become Kampuchea and Richard Nixon had given birth to Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge Communists sealed their borders and withdrew into isolation. The cities were forcibly evacuated and the people were sent back to the land – not to the villages from which they had come, but to new ...”

“... political refugees. Of the Germans, many were businessmen, artists, musicians and scholars. They may have had a political preference for liberal England, especially if they were Jews, which many of them were: but if they did settle here, it was from choice, not necessity. A few straddled the professional/exile divide, like Friedrich Engels who came to ...”

“... only by way of nostalgic contrast to the ‘materialist’ 1950s. In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Richard Hoggart inveighed against the shallow Americanised world of the 1950s teenager, comparing London’s ‘harshly lighted milk bars’ to the communitarianism of prewar Leeds as he remembered it from his childhood. Hoggart was spinning a tale of moral ...”

“... her annotated with comments in Churchill’s handwriting, though she is warned that his judgment may no longer be reliable. She lives on a boat on the Thames and constantly worries that she might inadvertently sink it. All this is related with a degree of amusement but one of the funniest sections in the book begins when, at the age of 22, an unplanned ...”

“... till his arm ached, and then he flung him into a chair, gasping, cursing, and scarcely human. And Richard Chandos v. Boler, the Boche villain of Dornford Yates’s Cost Price:   ‘Look on your own face,’ I said; ‘for, by God, when you see it next, it won’t look the same.’   Then, as a man puts the weight, I put his face to the wall beside the ...”

“... guests who threw corn-ears at the bridal pair (no confetti, please), and all who made ‘rather a May game of marriage, than a holy institution of God’. William Gouge, a London minister, was a little more relaxed: in 1622 he allowed ‘all those lawful customs that are used for the setting forth of the outward solemnity thereof, as meeting of ...”