“... a speech was made by a bishop in full fig which I swear must have been scripted for him by Alan Bennett: as he delivered it, he actually performed the gesture of appearing to be washing his hands which I thought even the most unctuous prelates had been teased out of decades ago. The prefects, as it were, are tail-coated men who look like, and probably ...”

“... racing. ‘I think a cup of coffee is in order,’ I said to Martin Johnson of the Independent and Alan Lee of the Times, ‘and the only place on the ground that serves a proper filtered cup of the stuff is the Hove Shop.’ Most County grounds have an establishment like this, where anything that can reasonably be sold at a profit ...”

“... Not all of his honourable friends were distressed when Gaitskell died. ‘It was as if a great light had come into the sky,’ sallied Dick Crossman, in private. There was a risk that the book’s quotations might overdo the sneers and complaints, and they sometimes do. It’s as if some of them were professional critics, so hard are they to please. The ...”

“... do understand, through and through, because it is our own invention, or rather the invention of Alan Turing and John von Neumann. The now famous Universal Turing Machine was an imaginary device that could rearrange any row of l’s and 0’s in accordance with any finite set of rules supplied to it; the von Neumann computer is its electronic ...”

“... financial arrangement was part of the deal with 20th Century Fox negotiated by my expert lawyer, Alan U. Schwartz, who represented Tennessee Williams, Tom Stoppard, Truman Capote and Mel Brooks. ‘May the Schwartz be with you,’ Brooks joked in Spaceballs. He already was.As the plane began its descent, swinging over Santa Clarita, down across the Santa ...”

“... before, or a piece of sculpture. In 1971 there was work there in my school holidays. I held a light from the wings on a production of Murder in the Cathedral. I remember vividly shining it on the actresses in the chorus as they chanted: Does the bird sing in the south? Only the sea bird cries Driven inland by the storm. What sign of the spring of the ...”

“... of Alamein, 1976), who was told by the field-marshal that ‘if those papers ever came to light they would cause a Third World War.’ Nigel Hamilton was aged 12 when he first met Monty, who once introduced him to Churchill as his ‘socialist friend’ (in tribute to his independence of mind). Though describing Monty, in this volume, as ‘a revered ...”

“... On 31 August 1939 Alan Cameron was at his desk at the BBC, where he was secretary to the Central Council of School Broadcasting, when he heard that the British fleet was mobilising. This meant that war with Germany was imminent and Cameron telephoned home to give his wife, the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, the news. She received it without apparent emotion and with an awkwardness of tone that made an impression on the Irish writer and occasional IRA gunman Sean O’Faolain, with whom she was in bed at the time ...”

“... car crash’. To judge by his title, Hall’s starting point seems to have been the scene from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s 1986 graphic novel The Watchmen in which Rorschach, an alienated outlaw convinced that the world has no meaning other than that which we impose on it (which is why he is named after the ink-blot test), is betrayed to the police. As ...”

“... lime had mysteriously declined after the Bronze Age. Vera believes that oaks reproduced within light thorny thickets where animals could not get at them. Once they had grown up and overtopped the thorn they created an oak grove. They did not reproduce beneath themselves, but grew up in new thickets in the savannah, to which their acorns had been carried by ...”

“... indifferent private press books – would not by themselves have warranted a book on the scale of Alan Crawford’s admirable biography. It is Ashbee’s attempts to give practical expression to the idea that art matters that make Crawford’s apology for a book ‘more ponderous than its subject deserves’ unnecessary. Ashbee’s ideas were a legacy of ...”

“... Three hours beyond Singapore’s territorial waters, north of what is called the Horsburgh Light, the Petro Ranger’s Australian captain, Ken Blyth, found himself surrounded by armed men on the bridge. A dozen pirates, faces covered in balaclavas, had apparently boarded the tanker from a small craft that the crew did not see. They put a machete to ...”

“... while the source is cool and inscrutable. Snowden later told the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, that if ‘I end up in chains in Guantánamo Bay … I can live with it’. Greenwald is a former constitutional and human rights lawyer, and now a journalist who isn’t afraid to point the finger at the conventional and the powerful. Snowden ...”

“... 22 when the war began.) Pityingly, the narrator observes Jak’s snub-nosed profile in the half-light: ‘I could tell from his narrow cheeks that he was still young; his steel helmet looked almost like the shell of a tortoise. These boys had a special something about their cheeks that recalled playing soldiers on a suburban common. “My Redskin ...”

“... parody of the industrial worker, as represented by Albert Finney in Karel Reisz’s film of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The most exciting young actor of his generation tracked across the Nottingham cobbles, as Cameron was tracked through Notting Hill, by an unseen camera car. The liberation of moving through a city ...”