“... debt. European involvement in the Egyptian economy steadily increased: the American economist Henry Carter Adams believed the commission was so powerful it was becoming the ‘practical dictator of Egypt’. This exercise of ‘soft’ imperialism led to a nationalist rebellion, British military intervention and the creation of a ‘veiled ...”

“... He was employed to suborn or assassinate Laurence Olivier, while the actor was making the film Henry V in neutral Eire. It is claimed, on the dust-cover, that Purser met Friedrich Harris in California in 1979. This is, presumably, a blague, but the book is a plausible imitation of published memoirs by dubious characters, real-life autobiography by a ...”

“... problem is to find an alternative myth (for Rudolf Bahro and Raymond Williams ecology was the green hope, as the red faded). In Das Kapital, published a few years earlier, Karl Marx tore apart the workings of the 19th-century world. But, notoriously, he never said much about the earthly paradise he hoped for. Looking backward filled that gap. Here was the ...”

“... lover of serious art. To stroke, or to desire to stroke, the curvaceous surface of a sculpture by Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth is of course an entirely proper response to stone or bronze. But to feel, furtively, because we half-believe, and wish to tease ourselves that we do believe, that the bronze hat, or boot, or whatever, is real, or the marble nude ...”

“... of her was not the same as the one they had started on quite a short time earlier. This had a green instead of a blue and white label and was also about half-empty already.’ A little later: Gwen got up quickly and toddled to the litter-bin behind Rhiannon. There, having let the empty bottle rustle and thump down inside, she was to be heard knocking out ...”

“... maker, the washerwoman and her daughter hawking dripping door to door. And, with some help from Henry Mayhew and from modern historians like Stedman Jones, Anna Davin has indeed delivered such segments of the Late Victorian and Edwardian labouring poor from the patronage of friend and foe. She has done so with a strong historical sympathy and a realism that ...”

“... mostly spent at home, where the unsatisfactory interior of Colne Road and its ‘unutterable’ green linoleum formed an ever more peculiar contrast to his bedroom, with its life-size plaster bust of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Less a cuckoo than a peacock in the parental nest, as the 1960s dawned Strong worked on his parallel project of ...”

“... a nightmare, for instance, until it has a successful ending. (This latter is reminiscent of Henry James’s account in A Small Boy and Others of a ‘dream-adventure’, an ‘immense hallucination’, in which he turned the tables on enemies who were trying to break into his room by bursting open the door and scattering them.) Schatzman encouraged Ruth ...”

“... and written in Wainwright’s evenings. He was Borough Treasurer of Kendal. His small house on the Green had one public room and here he worked while his wife and son, who had nowhere else to go, were made to sit in silence. No telephone, no television. Precious few friends. ‘There was never a single free evening when I didn’t apply myself to the task with ...”

“... section I’d been sustained by the endless seeming supply of Swallows and Amazons and Anne of Green Gables. And I liked the woodcuts by Joan Hassall used on each Bowen volume, which – though I still like them very much – I can now see are a few shades more sentimental and simplifying than the words inside. (Bowen in a 1968 letter to William Plomer at ...”

“... Around him he gathered friends and like-minded acquaintances. His closest friend was the painter Henry Fuseli; his most notable protégés included Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft. For decades, until Johnson’s death in 1809, they came in varying combinations to his weekly dinners, where the vitality of the conversation made up for the dullness of the ...”

“... in this way, the mathematical sublime has cast its spell. At the end of the fourth act of Henry V, the King asks his herald for details of the English dead at Agincourt. The herald hands over a paper, and the King reads: Edward, the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gam, esquire; None else of name; and of all other men But ...”

“... prolific author, attributed the invention of this novel ‘driving club’ to the Scottish amateur Henry Lamb. Its aim, Hutchinson added, was the ‘prevention of error’. ‘The face of the head is convex,’ Gibson tells Adams, ‘and it matters not whether you heel or toe a ball, they always go straight.’ He has never used one himself, he adds, reasoning ...”

“... when I arrived at Boston, the immigration officer commented on the length of time I’ve held a Green Card. ‘A Green Card is usually considered a path to citizenship,’ he said, a sentiment both irritatingly reproving and movingly patriotic. I mumbled something about how he was perfectly correct, and left it at ...”

“... Animal Snap. In the cluttered, narrow-windowed living-room of our house in the village of Hempton Green in Norfolk, my mother and I progressed from letters to words to sentences, stopping the game at intervals to listen to the BBC news crackling from the wireless, its fretwork grill sawn to represent an inappropriately Japanese-style rising sun. By the time ...”