“... Archer, J.M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, A.C. Benson, Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel ...”

“... annual showpiece. Inside the Brighton Centre, a hulking, rather worn building which was opened by James Callaghan in September 1977, shortly before the close working relationship between unions and Labour governments collapsed, seemingly for good, the conference hall was quiet and two-thirds full. The upstairs galleries had ...”

“... which has almost no money, virtually no formal responsibilities and sits in an 18th-century town hall on the high street. Powell was the lesser mayor, and it rankled. It still does. Being mayor number two, he had to stand behind the borough mayor at municipal events. ‘The second-fiddle aspects,’ he said, as he drove me back from Witts’s house. ‘They ...”

“... had left bombsites that were thickest around the docks. The cenotaph in front of St George’s Hall told us what had happened to the men who enlisted there. Surrounded by Murphys and Rooneys you could hardly forget the Great Famine that pushed waves of Irish immigrants into Liverpool cellars and court housing. Before the Second World War, thirty thousand ...”

“... from Andrewes’s sermon on the role of the Magi in the Nativity story, preached at the court of James I at Christmas 1622, was to be incorporated virtually word for word into the opening lines of the 1927 poem ‘The Journey of the Magi’: ‘A cold coming they had of it, at this time of the yeare; just the worst time of the yeare . . . the waies ...”

“... In December 1501 the Scottish poet William Dunbar received £5 from the Court of King James IV, a payment which was given to him, according to the Treasurer’s accounts, ‘eftir he com furth of Ingland’. It is not known for sure what he had been doing there. He may well have been in the entourage of the Scottish embassy which was conducting the negotiations with Henry VII that led to the marriage two years later of Princess Margaret Tudor to James IV ...”

“... degree of apprehension about leaving ‘the comforts and quiet’ of the family seat at Hengrave Hall. By 9 June, when Gage set off for Harwich, the allies knew that Napoleon was with the Armée du Nord and manoeuvring for battle. On the 15th Gage was in Amsterdam, making a few cautious aesthetic judgments. ‘The old church … has three very fine painted ...”

“... which he worked for more than two decades. It would be easy to identify Parks with his anti-hero, James, who observes the chaos and corruption around him but does little to try and change things. Parks anticipates this conflation in his prologue, guessing that the reader will say ‘That’s Parks,’ but adds that he has mixed fact and fiction. The ...”

“... eyeballs defocus. He grins with browning teeth. ‘There we are at the cashier’s desk in the hall, poor old Mossy O’Brien and myself, I’d been painting the whole week. Bags on the mat. The pony and trap outside on the gravel waiting to take us off to the GS&WR for Dublin. Behind the counter, in her black bombazine and gold chains, old Ma ...”

“... Paul of Tarsus, they call themselves Paul when they are not Paul, Peter when they are not Peter, James when they are not James, Jude when they are not Jude. Sometimes they put in circumstantial detail to make their claims more plausible: so pseudo-Paul tells his gullible readers ‘I, Paul, write this greeting with my own ...”

“... decades wear on, we see a boom in high culture at the expense of its vulgar relation, the music hall: the rise and rise of the Hazards, in fact, and the fall of the Chances, who are song-and-dance girls. Told by Dora Chance, a marvellously vivacious old ruin who is at her best when she is, as she says, ‘drunk in charge of a narrative’, Wise Children ...”

“... number of the 47 novels to print. A new and complete edition of the letters (edited by N. John Hall) is about to take over from Bradford Booth’s handy but imperfect single volume. A new and definitive biography (by Hall again) is in hand. And there has been an astonishing number of monographs and hardbacked collections ...”

“... with similar impatience to the list of phobias drawn up by the American psychologist Stanley Hall. Hall had managed to find 132. In Freud’s thinking about phobia there is a consistent emphasis on the scale and density of the precautions erected against danger. Phobia’s anticathexis, he observed, takes the shape of ...”

“... shows him at his imperious peak, strutting among the luminaries as they make their way through the Hall of Mirrors and the Gallery of Great Battles to a candlelit table the length of a small runway. Most of the guests, including Jeff Bezos, look a little uncomfortable, unsure whether to gawp or pose. But Ghosn is clearly in his element. And just in case anyone ...”

“... the Nobel Peace Prize he delivered a dazzling sermon repeatedly interrupted by cheers; outside the hall, hundreds of college students silently held torches in the snow. The new spirit of the era ran from the students in Oslo saluting the brave civil rights marchers in Birmingham, Alabama, whose leaders, in turn, invoked Mahatma Gandhi and non-violence in ...”