“... in this country were inclined to laugh. Some farcical anti-climax was expected – Anguilla on a wider stage, with penguins. Events which soon followed, ending with Mrs Thatcher taking the salute at a victory parade, have made it hard to remember why it all at first seemed so ...”

“... The structural ironies of Edward Thomas’s life still condition his reputation. Just as he made a late poetic start, so criticism has been slow to gather momentum. Even the recent spate of studies – by Michael Kirkham, Stan Smith, and the contributors to Jonathan Barker’s Art of Edward Thomas – seems more fortuitous than co-ordinated ...”

“... Jay Winter’s introduction to the work in honour of Henry Pelling points to a shift that has been taking place in the writing of labour history – from concentration on militant strivings towards interest in the ordinary existence of working men and women. The first approach was pioneered by a number of Marxist scholars ...”

“... It’s most likely that I first came across the idea of Humphrey Bogart not in a Bogart movie, but in A bout de souffle. Not in 1960, when it came out – I was more likely to have seen Spartacus then – but three or four years later, when the Godard movie was shown again (and again) at the Academy cinema on Oxford Street, the Hampstead Everyman or the NFT, while I was hoovering up the backlist of the Nouvelle Vague ...”

“... addressee in this collection, gets five thousand words. Yet Cobb, who died in 1996, was not only a historian of acknowledged genius. As these letters incidentally but consistently demonstrate, he was also a maverick member of the wider cultural world. He chaired the Booker judges ...”

“... Wall Street: ‘We are the 99 per cent.’ Joseph Stiglitz thinks it might be him, on the back of an article he wrote for Vanity Fair in 2011 entitled: ‘Of the 1 per cent, by the 1 per cent, for the 1 per cent.’ Others think it was the economist Emmanuel Saez, who helped popularise the idea that 99 per cent of American households have been watching their ...”

“... As peripatetic​ as he was, Fred Sparks, who was then a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, didn’t cover the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. He was too busy reporting on the civil war in Greece. But on repeated trips over the next decade to what reporters and cartographers still called the Levant, one thing Sparks always came back to was the plight of the Palestinian refugees ...”

“... Around a year ago​ a rat died in my kitchen. The first thing I noticed was the cloud of bluebottles flying drunkenly against the window. Then there was the smell, which was fetid and slightly sweet. It took me a while to find the source, and when I eventually pulled up the floorboards there was nothing left of the rat but a shrivelled sack of skin and fur, its tail a mangy question mark ...”

“... Isaw​ the end of it then, I mean the end of it as it was, as my mother told the story of my father’s sudden deafness. The turn towards the deer in the snow, two pairs of black eyes, the earplugs falling out soundlessly, the shot – then the line on his hearing chart falling off a cliff at a thousand decibels ...”

“... In 1969, while he was serving a prison sentence for unlawful assembly, Ian Paisley sent this message to his congregation: I rejoice with you in the rich blessings of last weekend. I knew that our faithful God would pour out His bounty. In prayer in this cell I touched the Eternal Throne and had the gracious assurance of answered prayer ...”

“... to make money from evening entertainments. They’re plundered and castrated; so they survive ... A rigid cult would be dangerous, like the ceremonial which forbade Byzantine courtiers to touch the persons of the nobility, so that when the latter fell in noble intoxication into a pond they got no help. So ...”

“... memories of the paper in her day are accompanied by extracts from some of the pieces published at the time. On the morning Margaret Thatcher’s death was announced, the lesser lights of television who were minding the shop did her proud. A river of bittersweet hyperbole flowed by, ...”

“... According to E.P. Thompson, The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Rights of Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he argues, that we find ‘the slumbering Radicalism’ which was preserved through the 18th century, and broke out again and again in the 19th ...”

“... Wordsworth​ was the first poet I fell in love with as a teenager. My English teacher (who preferred Pope and Henry James) mocked me for my taste, reminding me of Shelley’s description of Wordsworth in ‘Peter Bell the Third’ as ‘a solemn and unsexual man ...”

“... been raining​ and the scent of jasmine hung over Moray Place. Most of the windows were dark and a notion of privacy seemed embedded in the stone. It must have been close to half past ten, because there was a sudden burst of fireworks over Edinburgh Castle – a nightly feast in August ...”