“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... don’t see why not.’ So while​ this is certainly a ‘literature of power’, in the terms of Thomas De Quincey, it is also ‘a literature of knowledge’. You either will or won’t recognise the references to Brueghel’s painting Dulle Griet, say, or Holbein’s Dance of Death, or Brecht’s 1940 radio play The Trial of Lucullus, or John Arthos’s ...”

“... of the sail. We leaned on the bridge above the escalators linking London Bridge station and St Thomas Street. It wasn’t quite how Garrett remembered it. He was preoccupied by new projects, a novel of UFOs, ley lines and a 3000-mile US road trip to hot springs and abandoned mines – and then, closer to home, guerrilla initiatives in response to the ...”

“... of Baltimore. ‘This posits that a building is at its maximum moment of approbation when it is brand-new; that it then goes steadily downhill and at 70 reaches its nadir. If you can get a building past that sticky moment, then the curve begins to go up again very rapidly until at 100 it is back where it was in year one. A 100-year-old building is much more ...”

“... land with the look: ‘somehow we have not been very successful in life’; and this park itself, brand-new, a made-island of green in all this grave ocean, and in this silence, a little noise. The leaves are blown aslant and in their shade a few lie prostrate on young grass, mothers, young girls, two boys together; and meditate, or talk inaudibly; on ...”

“... 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 ...”