“... an Uzbek taxi driver, exiled from his own country and caught up in a revolution (which seems to be in Egypt, though the local detail is deliberately non-specific and at times contradictory). But he also wants to tell us how he got hold of the story, how he’s constructing it, and why that’s a good idea. The action is set last year: ‘As you will ...”

“... led to its publication as a three-volume novel in October 1862, under the name M.E. Braddon. By December, Lady Audley’s Secret had gone through eight editions, and Braddon’s tale of false identities, desertion, detection, bigamy, blackmail, arson, madness and murder had brought her celebrity and become the template for a genre. ...”

“... if anyone had harassed the creature, well, they’d have been the one flensed. I happened to be passing through Oban en route to Mull so I joined the small group assembled behind the pizza parlour and public toilets on the pier. Fishing boats were tied up, and across the bay the island of Kerrera lay in the first spring sunshine. The whale had chosen a ...”

“... of plot and causality, which we could see going several different ways if we wanted to. The pieces by contrast are precise bits of visual and aural engineering, not a frame or sound out of place, even if we can’t be sure what their place is. Carruth is said to be working on a third ...”

“... him the subject of suspicion during the Terror, when he was denounced as a counter-revolutionary by a fellow artist Jean-Baptiste Wicar, and accused of making paintings that ‘dirty the walls of the Republic’. Forced to defend himself before the Société Populaire et Républicaine des Arts, Boilly was exonerated, largely due to his canny submission of a ...”

“... If you want​ to appeal against a guilty verdict given by a crown court jury you first have to seek permission from the Court of Appeal. For permission to be granted, a judge has to be satisfied there is an ‘arguable case’ that the conviction was ‘unsafe ...”

“... found himself ‘dreaming of the idea of somehow creating a living place where works of art could be enjoyed, inherent to the domestic setting, where young people could be at home unhampered by the greater austerity of the museum or public art gallery, and where an informality might ...”

“... have never panned out, but you can visit the one in Nottingham any Saturday night – a sign by the loos plaintively reads: MIAMI, 4378 MILES —>.) The ethnography of Hooters culture by ‘Richard Baldwin’ – one of the collaborators’ pseudonyms, actually the borrowed name of one of their friends, a 71-year-old ...”

“... person at Chanel since its founder, and he wanted less fuss, though he did request that his ashes be mingled with those of his beloved cat, Choupette, if she died before him. Maybe he forgot that the cat had even more lives than he did. Fuss, when it comes to fashion designers, has a way of multiplying, so it was inevitable that Lagerfeld’s memorial, when ...”

“... staircase you’re likely to see in Rome. The building was designed for the Borough of St Pancras by Albert Thomas, a disciple of Lutyens, and opened in 1937 as St Pancras Town Hall. Twenty-eight years later, the borough was one of three – along with Holborn and Hampstead – brought together to form Camden. A seven-year, £60 million renovation of the town ...”

“... there is little theorising and no thesis. Andrea Lee likens them to ‘a set of photographs taken by an amateur who is drawn to his subject by instinct and capricious inclination’. This unpretentiousness is one of the great strengths of her book. She obviously has no interest in selecting or distorting evidence to make ...”

“... idly to the seemingly unpromising character of Cromwell himself, I could not help being struck by the aptness to Greene of phrase after phrase in Buchan’s final appraisal of the Lord Protector and regicide. ‘Few minds have had a more invincible candour.’ ‘He was never out of hearing of the common voices of life.’ ‘One talent he possessed in the ...”

“... like Gerald Nabarro. After the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, when Macmillan was panicked by a typical Rab Butler indiscretion into sacking the dead wood in his Cabinet, Deedes was brought in to oversee the Government’s public relations. Spin-doctors were unheard of at that time, and Deedes’s task was to exploit his Fleet Street contacts to the ...”

“... as I have just done, on the writing of a volume on the sociology of 20th-century England is to be struck at once by the contrast between studying events and people in the immediate past and events and people which, for anyone of my age or less, are as remote as the First Reform Bill or the Charge of the Light Brigade. I ...”

“... the late Thirties; but maybe it symbolises the lack of Western metaphors for what it’s like to be Albanian. Albania has been behind one iron curtain or another for centuries, and its impenetrability is its lure. It is probably cultural condescension, but I don’t think any literary agent would have been prepared to promote this bumbly amateurish novel ...”