“... Revisiting​ old haunts is a hazardous pastime. The beloved buildings may look smaller or shabbier, the unforgettable view is ruined by the new solar farm, the once fascinating characters in the novel have lost their power to enchant, everything seems blurred or – the verdict from which there is no appeal – dated ...”

“... were to ask how he came by such detail, one possible answer is that he made it up. As this episode may suggest, the author of this book is the omniscient narrator personified, a participant-observer in every drama. Thus when the young Raymond, a lad of 11 or 12, rushes out onto the hills, Fred lumbers after him, noting the way the bracken bends and breaks ...”

“... researcher’s heart would not thrill at the words: ‘Please burn this letter that no mortal eyes may read it’? Manuscripts may seem to offer the pleasures of the peephole but no serious historian would argue that personal manuscripts offer access to unvarnished, unmediated truth. Letters do not simply display our ...”

“... have their own account of who they are and what they’re doing. The professional demographer may classify someone according to a set of categories widely recognised among experts, but unrecognisable or even offensive to the person being classified. An economist may insist that someone is maximising their welfare on the ...”

“... If you’ve spent time at any of the private colleges and universities in the US, you may have been struck by something mirage-like about the campuses: a distinct lightness of being, despite the stony masses of the buildings. It’s partly an effect of the heavy deployment of architectural pastiche to create the illusion of antiquity, but it may also have to do with the fact that many of these institutions arose as much out of vanity or whim as necessity ...”

“... the man who creates to the pattern of his creation like the skin left behind by the snake? It may be that a partnership between art and sickness is a trademark of High Modernism, as Edmund Wilson argued in The Wound and the Bow. But if so, Lawrence wanted to be in a different business. Modernist sickness is more likely to be neurasthenia or hypochondria ...”

“... guns is Ward Hill Lamon, who proves to be almost as formidable an adherent as Joab was to King David of Israel. There had been a plot to kill Lincoln at Baltimore: that is why the new President has ‘snuck in like some old chicken thief’ – to use the words of one of his enemies, the wretched Herold, a youth working in a chemist’s shop and hanging ...”

“... librarian Ianthe Broome. The parish of St Basil, on the fringe of North Kensington in NW London, may not be classic Austen country, but the principal characters, all off-spring of deceased Anglican clergymen, might be the equivalents of Jane herself. Like any Austen novel, An Unsuitable Attachment makes a cluster of courtships an occasion to uncover the ...”

“... from adult cells, the conclusion that adult mammals could not be cloned, a journalistic hoax (David Rorvik’s announcement that he had helped a wealthy eccentric clone himself), a brilliant experimentalist (Karl Illmensee) accused of faking results, and, finally, a small band of mavericks working outside the prestigious centres of biotechnology in the ...”

“... with a quasi-apology for what might not be accurate about the rest of the poem: ‘Of course I may be remembering it all wrong/after, after – how many years?’ After a rapt description of the confluence of the Tapajós and the Amazon rivers, Bishop glibly supposes that the beauty may be part fantasy: Suddenly ...”

“... to act without full or explicit orders and been praised for not ‘going by the book’. This may have allowed field commanders ‘to be creative’, but it also distorted the relationship between the army and the political leadership of the state. The example of the Golan Heights, occupied although Dayan and the government had decided not to do so, is ...”

“... shops and cheap restaurants. There are few neighbourhoods like it in central London, but its days may be numbered. Until the 1960s, Drummond Street continued to meet Eversholt Street on the east side of Euston, but this section of the road disappeared, along with the Euston Arch, when the present station was built. There was considerable opposition to the ...”

“... plan was agreed even so, and war broke out on 29 November 1947. By the time Arab armies invaded in May 1948, around a thousand had died on each side and some 300,000 Palestinians had fled or been expelled. In July 1948 the Israeli army attacked the Palestinian village of Lydda, located between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Soldiers threw hand grenades into ...”

“... Baldwin died’. Philip Roth has been led to histories of American racism by Coates’s books. David Brooks credits him for advancing an ‘education for white people’ that evidently began after ‘Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and the other killings’. Even USA Today thinks that ‘to have such a voice, in such a moment, is a ray of light.’ Coates ...”

“... husband waited and footed the bill. According to Burke, ‘she began planning her escape’ in May 1937 – an escape from the life, though not yet an escape from the man. She wrote home about her fits of what she called ‘the jitters’, while Aziz wrote to her parents that he wanted nothing more than ‘to bring peace to her soul’.She chafed under the ...”