“... odd terminology of the LT billboard, ‘a body on the line’. And her father comes down from the North to tell her that he is remarrying and disowning her. Maggie’s past is disclosed in mournful flashbacks: it contains a pregnancy, a suicide attempt, a VD scare, an oafish seduction by the president of the ‘fuck of the month club’. Not much fun, as the ...”

“... designs, sober covers and superior typography (hangovers, as Morpurgo demonstrates, from John Lane’s Bodley Head). The Penguin aura was of solid, durable literature and (as Pelicans) sensible discussion. To work the paradox to death, one might claim that Penguins were paperbacks which, for most of their history, successfully passed themselves off ...”

“... of the bitter trials and struggles of the poor, of the grim divisions widening between the North and the South. These novels deeply impressed her contemporaries; but like all extrovert reportage they lose with time the power to be much more than scenic diagram and description. A telling detail thrown off in Dickens, the facts suggested or taken for ...”

“... and offering uniform, centrally managed retail outlets whose contents were the same from Bismarck, North Dakota to Albuquerque, New Mexico. In these glistening malls, Waldenbooks or B. Dalton had to pay the same high rents as the shops next door, Florsheim’s Shoes or Miller’s Outpost. This meant high volume, fast turnover. The chains aren’t interested in ...”

“... They’ll never pull it off, people said. Too little time, too little money, obstruction from the North … The April 2010 elections – both presidential and local – had gone poorly, ‘highly chaotic, non-transparent, and vulnerable to electoral manipulation’, as the international observers from the Carter Center declared ...”

“... of architecture is replete with figures whose careers were tied to the fortunes of great cities. John Nash’s genius for town-planning could only have flourished in London during the post-Waterloo boom years. Stanford White’s feeling for opulence fits the New York scene of the 1890s like an evening glove. So, too, did mid-Victorian Glasgow define the ...”

“... done were to make the first ever solo Atlantic crossing in a balloon, and to get shot down by the North Vietnamese in 1972, leading to an 11-month stay in the ‘Hanoi Hilton’. At the moment he is working with Felix Baumgartner, an Austrian high-altitude specialist whose Red Bull Stratos project has the goal of free-falling from a balloon at 120,000 ...”

“... prime minister, Alec Douglas-Home, to advise President Johnson against extending the war into the North. Following his election victory in October that year, Wilson was advised by the Foreign Office that, with regard to Vietnam, ‘ministers should agree to support the United States in this limited and controlled form of offensive action.’ He appears to ...”

“... remaking ourselves, the world over, in the image of US capitalism, because the only alternative is North Korean autarchy? Clearly he isn’t always wrong, though much of what he says in the course of this enlightening and infuriating book can and should be contested. It is best read in conjunction with Global Transformations, which is as dry as The Lexus and ...”

“... Minister. Through his mother, an Ulster Presbyterian by origin, he also acquired contacts in the North quite unusual among Dublin politicians. To the experience of growing up in a distinguished political and literary family, he could add his own experience as an administrator and an academic. He went into politics committed to the building of a just society ...”

“... play with. The designations are approximate and subject to change, but for now they go like this: North-South is the axis of simplicity; East-West that of pleasure. The North is spare, the South proliferative; the West bland, the East astringent … Well, for something so simple and seemingly arbitrary, there is probably ...”

“... wedding anniversary. Joan Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo, was married at the Cathedral of St John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue in New York in 2003. Dates are important. In a writer as fastidious as Didion they carry a lot of weight. Detail matters too, sometimes more than the main thing, or instead of it: Seven years ago today we took the leis from ...”

“... but had agreed to go to Scotland in August with Sarianna his sister and Pen, and join forces at North Berwick with his friends the Storys. Before starting, he had told John Forster that Pen and the Storys had persuaded him to this course, but that he meant to stay only a month. The friendship with the Storys was an old ...”

“... footage showing Britain from space. Cut again to another drone shot, heading inland from the North Sea this time, as far from Old Harry Rocks as you can get in the British Isles, towards Muckle Flugga lighthouse in the northernmost of the Shetland Islands, to watch a pod of orca hunting for seals.The narrative rhythms of such sequences are by now firmly ...”

“... Surrey is the Country of my Birth and my delight,’ John Evelyn told John Aubrey; and like Surrey, Evelyn has had more than his fair share of bad press over the years. Yet to picture him as simply the pious sermoniser the Victorians eulogised is as misleading as to write off Surrey as wall-to-wall Weybridge ...”