“... perceptively as Steen Eiler Rasmussen, who saw it in 1937 as The Unique City. More recently, both David Piper in his Companion Guide (1964) and Christopher Hibbert in Biography of a City (1969) have written with elegance and comprehension, the first closer to the form of the traditional guidebook, the second to the style of the popular historian. Yet there is ...”

“... by professional historians, in themselves, and she decides, in her introduction, that she cannot do better than quote David Lowenthal: ‘Even if future insights show up present errors and undermine present conclusions, evidence now available proves that some things almost certainly did happen and others did ...”

“... the past, would-be biographers have been discouraged from poking their noses into the business of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy ...”

“... pull down my trousers and smack me at great speed with both hands. If my father was there he’d say repeatedly ‘Leave him alone!’ or, rather, its equivalent in Yiddish, a language he normally reserved for confidences about money. My mother used his mollycoddling of me – whom he called his ‘pet lamb’ – as her excuse for favouring my ...”

“... is not difficult since the greatest of these murals are in Parisian churches.Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, designed by Jacques Ignace Hittorff, is a five-minute walk from the Gare du Nord (also by Hittorff). It was consecrated in 1844 and, because Hittorff was an authority on the use of colour in ancient temples, was ...”

“... LET ME TELL YOU, IT WAS WONDERFUL.’ Maman, the giant spider already seen in the Tate’s turbine hall in 2000, protects the sac of marble eggs attached to her abdomen and menaces the viewer. ‘My best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and useful as an ...”

“... printed books in a plum-coloured binding. I take down a volume, and read on the spine the name ‘David Copperfield’; underneath, in slightly smaller letters, is another name, ‘Charles Dickens’. I open the book, and find the same combination repeated on the title page. I have heard of Dickens, and conclude that what I am holding is a novel written by ...”

“... How have so many thriving practices fallen to the globalisation formula of ‘other countries do what you do better/more cheaply, so you might as well give up,’ while farming, an activity thousands of years old, continues to have mastery of the British lowlands, at a time when the world is awash with cheap (at least ...”

“... the editors write, ‘but present it as a collection of authoritatively engaged voices … who do not always agree, but who have been willing to think afresh about the lives that touched Shakespeare’s most closely.’ In a sense the book’s aim is to be something like a TV documentary about the life of a much loved celebrity, though after four centuries ...”

“... David Foster Wallace’s parents, Sally and Jim, were the sort of couple who read each other Ulysses in bed while holding hands. Jim read David and his younger sister Amy Moby-Dick as a bedtime story. It wasn’t inevitable that the boy would grow up to write an epic novel, but it wasn’t accidental ...”

“... provided a framework for the making and showing of propaganda films. Roel vande Winkel and David Welch’s essay collection, Cinema and the Swastika, widens the picture much further. In the mid-1930s, the Nazis began covertly acquiring cinemas and cinema chains around the world, while at the same time expanding the international distribution of German ...”

“... not have to wait for the invention of the cathode-ray tube, even though poor Gladstone had to make do with newsprint to seize his opportunity – including the photo-opportunity, as shots of him felling trees sufficiently indicate. The designer axe was not far behind. Lloyd George, too, did his bit to lower the tone of politics once secularisation had made the ...”

“... We have defied the laws of arithmetic,’ declared a buoyant David Steel after he had heard the result of the Croydon, North-West by-election, ‘One plus one really does equal three.’ It is now apparent that the public opinion polls were consistently correct in showing that, while support for the Liberal Party as such remained of a traditionally modest order and support for the Social Democrats alone was a similar or even smaller percentage, backing for the two-party alliance as a third force in British politics was a wholly different matter, and promised the chance of a complete breakthrough under the existing electoral system ...”

“... and illegal economic migrants can’t really be applied to the mass Jewish migration at the Fin de Siècle. I never thought of my paternal grandfather, a penniless, devout Jew without a trade from the small town of Korosten in Ukraine, who arrived in Britain in 1901, as having sought asylum. But he did. David Glover wants ...”

“... David Daniell is also the author of the only full-length critical study of Buchan’s work – The Interpreter’s House (1975). Both there and here, in the introduction to this collection of 12 of Buchan’s stories, he is concerned to defend the writer against the usual accusations of anti-semitism, racism and blatant imperialism; to protest against the way he is automatically ranked with Sapper, Dornford Yates and similar figures; and to assert that he is not only worth reading (which the general public has never forgotten), but also worth reading seriously ...”