“... to sneak a little architecture back into things. He had some clear ambitions: appoint hungry young architects, let them colonise not just the surface but the internal spaces as well (Holden never got far below ground), spend more money on some stations than others – and above all, make it happen. He was not against variety. Because of the dimensions of ...”

“... of the biological world for the next fifty years. In 1795, Geoffroy recruited Georges Cuvier, a young and relatively obscure naturalist. Cuvier was born in 1769, in a Protestant region close to the Swiss border, and was educated in Germany. As tutor to the son of a wealthy Protestant family in Normandy, he found time, pottering on the seashore, to refine ...”

“... thirty years after the best of them began to publish – John James, Chris Torrance, Lee Harwood, Andrew Crozier, Peter Riley, J.H. Prynne, Michael Haslam, Douglas Oliver, Barry MacSweeney, Denise Riley – they must nonetheless wonder, from time to time, whether theirs is a case of having missed the boat which would only have been worth catching if they’d ...”

“... or ‘perfumed’. I opened it up and I can remember well enough the sentence I read. ‘The young odalisques in the harim were also instructed in the exquisite use of their fingernails.’ Something close to that, at any rate. I was not sure what an odalisque was, but the word ‘harim’ (why not ‘harem’) gave me a clue. And I had to read on, to ...”

“... been discounted it wouldn’t have made any difference: the new Conservative MP for Basingstoke, Andrew Hunter, would just have been elected with a majority of 12,451 rather than 12,450. Hunter won’t be seeking re-election in May, having seen his majority – which peaked in 1992 at 21,198, making Basingstoke an apparently unassailable Tory stronghold ...”

“... contents page: Barbara Trapido, Anthony Thwaite, Anne Stevenson, Alan Brownjohn, Helen Simpson, Andrew Motion, Michael Hofmann, Alan Sillitoe, Louis de Bernières and Geoff Dyer are ten of them, and ‘new’ isn’t the first word that springs to mind. But there are plenty of good reasons, too obvious to need repeating, for the inclusion of well-known ...”

“... Philippe Starck-designed Paramount Hotel just off Times Square in New York, I felt sorry for the young guy whose job it was to open the door whenever anyone wanted to enter or leave. I stopped to chat, and offered my sympathy for having such a tedious job. He replied: ‘I’m from Basingstoke – nothing’s boring after that.’ There’s a spirited ...”

“... devotion to the Nabokov cause and his mastery of out-of-the-way works was ingratiating. The young man (still under thirty) was summoned to Montreux in 1968, and commissioned to put together a complete bibliography of Nabokov’s publications. Out of this came an intimate acquaintance which encouraged Field to write in May 1968, ‘answering an unplaced ...”

“... For Sher, the Scottish printers and booksellers of the second half of the century, such as Andrew Millar, William Strahan, Thomas Cadell (father and son) and George Robinson in London, and Alexander Kincaid, John Balfour, John Bell and William Creech in Edinburgh, were not ‘mechanicks’ as Strahan once complained, but collaborators in a ...”

“... And what am I now?’ That is almost exactly like Natasha’s exclamation at the death of Prince Andrew, which the translators weaken by paraphrase, finding its literalness too disconcerting. It should be: ‘Where is he and who is he now?’ Who is he now? Tolstoy’s sense of identity was so strong that it would obviously survive death. But because so ...”

“... was elected, he spoke at a mental health trust fun day in his constituency instead of going on the Andrew Marr Show. Later that day he was filmed as he hurried along the pavement outside Westminster in silence, refusing to answer reporters’ questions: it ‘looked like a perp walk’, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian. ‘He isn’t playing the ...”

“... was left. The cover-up was carefully supervised by the Tory Whips office, in particular by two young MPs, David ‘Two Brains’ Willetts and Andrew Mitchell, whose father, David Mitchell, is also a Tory MP, and once chose Neil Hamilton to be his Parliamentary Private Secretary. The Guardian had told a bit of the ...”

“... Can William Hague draw any comfort from the experience of his similarly beleaguered predecessor Andrew Bonar Law, a scarcely visible figure in the pantheon of Tory leaders? What is best known about him is that he is ‘unknown’. Lord Blake’s celebrated biography, The Unknown Prime Minister (1955), took its cue from Asquith’s perhaps apocryphal remark ...”

“... designed to sabotage the peace process at this very critical time’. A crowd of about two hundred young people marched on the RUC station at Lurgan. A few of them threw petrol bombs at it. Mrs Nelson had been the Catholic residents’ legal representative in their efforts to stop the annual Drumcree march from coming down the Garvaghy Road. She was also ...”

“... but nor has he come across one where it isn’t controlled. Suppose Colin Spencer was a young member of the Sambia people of Papua New Guinea, and made in the flesh the blunder that he makes in language when he describes them, of confusing active and passive in an oral act of sex. Suppose, to be brutally frank, that he blew when the cultural ...”