“... of the sail. We leaned on the bridge above the escalators linking London Bridge station and St Thomas Street. It wasn’t quite how Garrett remembered it. He was preoccupied by new projects, a novel of UFOs, ley lines and a 3000-mile US road trip to hot springs and abandoned mines – and then, closer to home, guerrilla initiatives in response to the ...”

“... don’t see why not.’ So while​ this is certainly a ‘literature of power’, in the terms of Thomas De Quincey, it is also ‘a literature of knowledge’. You either will or won’t recognise the references to Brueghel’s painting Dulle Griet, say, or Holbein’s Dance of Death, or Brecht’s 1940 radio play The Trial of Lucullus, or John Arthos’s ...”

“... of Baltimore. ‘This posits that a building is at its maximum moment of approbation when it is brand-new; that it then goes steadily downhill and at 70 reaches its nadir. If you can get a building past that sticky moment, then the curve begins to go up again very rapidly until at 100 it is back where it was in year one. A 100-year-old building is much more ...”

“... land with the look: ‘somehow we have not been very successful in life’; and this park itself, brand-new, a made-island of green in all this grave ocean, and in this silence, a little noise. The leaves are blown aslant and in their shade a few lie prostrate on young grass, mothers, young girls, two boys together; and meditate, or talk inaudibly; on ...”

“... 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 family name could stay: ‘Akerman is fine. Akerman could be German, Flemish or even a brand of champagne.’ Mosjek, who spoke only Polish and Yiddish, lived with them. To please him, Jacques and Nelly sent their daughter to a Jewish school, save for a brief period when, aged seven, she stopped eating and they decided to send her to boarding ...”

“... 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 ...”