“... 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 Zangwill (Arthur Quiller-Couch and Rudyard Kipling sent messages of ...”

“... Robin Hood is a programme of the left. Robin Hood is Jeremy Corbyn. He’s Russell Brand. He’s Hugo Chávez. So it used to seem. But a change has come about. The wealthiest and most powerful in Europe, Australasia and North America have turned the myth to their advantage. In this version of Robin Hood the traditional poor – the ...”

“... for Baroque, this is followed by ‘The Apparition of Gongora’, the man who invented the Spanish brand of bubbling champagne called El Barroco, a heady wine of a style which, according to Borges, carries its own parody within. But Padilla never parodies anybody’s style, not even his own. In ‘Relief, where Every time a generation comes in or goes ...”

“... failing schools into being taken over by a stronger trust. He also made provision for ‘brand-new schools set up by charities, universities, business, community or faith groups, teachers and groups of parents’, which he snappily called free schools. Legally, the structure of academies and free schools is identical: a charitable company limited by ...”

“... between ‘When the evening is spread out against the sky’ (line 2 of ‘Prufrock’) and Thomas Hardy’s ‘forms there flung/Against the sky’ (‘The Abbey Mason’); between ‘certain half-deserted streets’ (line 4 of ‘Prufrock’) and ‘he sought out a certain street and number’ in Chapter 20 of Little Dorrit; or, moving beyond ...”

“... immigrants from Eastern Europe. The name he chose has often been said to be a tribute to Dylan Thomas, but it seems he first thought of it as ‘Dillon’, possibly after the hard-bitten Dodge City lawman Matt Dillon, hero of the TV Western Gunsmoke. He was twenty years old, skinny and scruffy in jeans and a ‘Huck Finn cap’. In an early article in the ...”

“... Caesar. His death. I always did whenever I read biographies. Because of course they all die. Thomas Alva Edison. Henry Ford. Benjamin Franklin. Marie Curie. Florence Nightingale. Winston Churchill. Louis Armstrong. Theodore Roosevelt.’‘You read Theodore Roosevelt’s biography when you were a kid?’‘I did, yes. There was a series. About twenty of ...”

“... Virgil, Gibbon and Congreve, Goethe and Nestroy, Machiavelli and Hobbes, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy, Mikhail Sholokhov and T.E. Lawrence, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf – this is just a small sampling. Basically, he read his way through the Marylebone public library. He periodically put this ...”

“... push to its limits.’ In my own time, punk and its aftermath saw a blizzard of French namedrops: Thomas Miller – the frontman of Television, who died recently – became Tom Verlaine, while his sometime girlfriend Patti Smith hollered ‘Go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud!’ and his pal Richard Hell traded Huysmans lines with Lester Bangs. One of the founding members ...”

“... who, in 1870, already suspected that their new town might fare better if named Upton Royal. Thomas Hardy is hoisted aboard and driven past Weymouth to the Isle of Portland, a rocky place where Marie Stopes was once to be found retired among stoneworkers still accustomed to testing the fertility of potential brides before finally consenting to marry ...”

“... and Sainsbury’s stocks tiny bottles of a red palm and rapeseed blend made by a health-food brand called Carotino. But that’s it.The oil palm grew in the floodplains and swamps of Africa millions of years before the existence of humans. Excavations in the Bosumpra Cave in Ghana show that people have been consuming some version of its oil for five ...”

“... new Westwood Cross shopping centre, only two – a burger joint and a store selling boast-brand accessories – aren’t part of retail chains headquartered elsewhere. Westwood Cross has sucked the life out of Ramsgate’s high street, where the branches of the big banks look isolated among derelict shopfronts, charity shops, junk shops, pound shops ...”

“... external role. Formally, the Elizabethan Church had settled the religious issue. But the national brand of Reformation it represented at home still left the diplomatic position of England relatively indeterminate. Here a potential field of conflict opened up. For dynastic sense of dignity pulled one way, impulses of doctrinal solidarity another. The only ...”

“... caused in part by construction for Olympic venues, was at odds with its green ambitions.In 2013, Thomas Bach – a German fencer, lawyer and sports bureaucrat – was elected the IOC’s ninth president. It has been his task to try to resolve the mounting problems faced by the organisation. It would be useful to have an account of his time in power that laid ...”

“... to the saddle, ride the wide pavements: hooded, no hands, coming out of nowhere, like the account Thomas Berger gives, in Little Big Man, of the Pawnee appearing over a bluff to a west-rolling wagon train. The postcode posse favour sturdy, thick-wheeled mountain bikes. They patrol territory, making their reports on mobile phones. They do not use towpaths or ...”