“... in the pyramid gave entry to a network of underground tunnels. The fabled Chinese Limehouse of Thomas Burke and Sax Rohmer, of Oscar Wilde’s opium dens, has long gone. And now the Good Friends restaurant in Salmon Lane, to which hungry diners travelled from all over the city, has followed them: converted into a store for building supplies. The spirit of ...”

“... the top of his T-shirt was soaked with sweat. ‘Goddamn bitch,’ he said. ‘This muthafucker is brand new. I want the goddamn thing to work. We’re sure gonna need its ass when we get to New Orleans.’ Sam’s neighbour had chickens outside his trailer and frogs were hiding in the pine trees along the drive. An American flag hung limply on the porch as ...”

“... their titles on the mast. Captain William Ian Pigott. Captain B.J. Sullivan. Rear-Admiral Horatio Thomas Austin. Lost witnesses to a walk that I could now resume in good heart. I treated Gill to a major fry-up at the Kingsnorth café. The rubber-stripping operation had a yellow truck parked at the gate: HOGARTH TYRE SHREDDERS. An Ackroydian coincidence? The ...”

“... in this case, as in others, have definite evidence by which he can make his statements good.’ Thomas Brattle FRS was a sceptical observer at Salem. ‘Even the Judges themselves,’ he observed, have, at some times, taken these confessours [i.e., the persons confessing themselves witches] in flat lyes, or contradictions, even in the Courts; by reason of ...”

“... Alfred E. Pinn of Southwark, was born in 1908; his great-grandfather, a trader called Zenos Thomas Victor Pinn, died in Lambeth Hospital during the Second World War. On the one hand, people are obsessed with ancestry and stories of origin, and records that used to take weeks to search are now visible in a matter of minutes, for a fee. On the other ...”

“... his colleague said. Wright was soon 30,000 feet above the Tasman Sea watching the programmer Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) being chased by unknowable agents in The Matrix. Wright found the storyline strangely comforting; it was good to know he wasn’t alone. At Auckland Airport, Wright kept his phone on flight mode, but turned it on to use the ...”

“... about ‘them’, men and women of ‘their kind’, posh ingrates, white English toffs.A toxic brand of cheap compassion threatened, from early on, to distract us from finding out what really caused those deaths. The clues to the tragedy were hiding in several tons of ash: the products used by those contractors, the fittings, the whole safety apparatus ...”

“... packing chocolate bars into Cadbury’s ‘selection boxes’ – Mondelez still uses the Cadbury brand name – for Christmas. For 24 hours a day, three shifts of sixty to seventy people worked a 100-metre packing line. Pasternak liked the job and the banter, and in a good month she could earn 2000 zloty (€500). She didn’t get the full-time job she ...”

“... oil, gas and fracking. And while Faragism’s worship of the exhaust pipe is less popular, less brand-critical than the party’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, you do hear talk in Northumberland of bringing back the coal mines. ‘There is still coal in the ground,’ Dennis Fancett, the chairman of a campaign group that has helped to get local railway stations ...”

“... Sitwell enthuses over a song about Havana night life. As late as 1959, the British historian Hugh Thomas recognised that Cuba was one of the few tropical countries to have created a modern culture of its own. He also noticed that Fidel Castro owed his power not to guerrilla warfare, as he had believed before visiting Cuba, but to television. The way Castro ...”

“... everywhere I turned that day there was some bamboozling elixir of the notion of plenty. Their own-brand products are made to high standards: the fresh meat, for example, is subject to much higher vigilance over date and provenance than any meat in Europe.1 ‘Some things take a while,’ Peter Morrison said, ‘you can put something out and it won’t ...”