“... start of the operation to ask what they thought its legacy would be. Not one – not Labour’s John Reid, now Baron Reid of Cardowan, or Des Browne, now Baron Browne of Ladyton, or John Hutton, now Baron Hutton of Furness, or Bob Ainsworth, or the Conservatives’ Philip Hammond or Liam Fox – was prepared to ...”

“... simply don’t know how old they are. The most complete and compendious of these scholarly works, John Burrow’s The Ages of Man (1986), reaches back through Medieval to Classical times to show how very differently existence was measured before our own pervasive if shallow mathematical and technological revolution. He reminds us that the Gospels record no ...”

“... summit in some hangar on the edge of a dock, between old railway lines and a new airport. A major exclusion zone around a place nobody has any good reason to visit. A geography that only makes sense when viewed from a helicopter. The reimagining of downriver stretches of the Thames was not limited to East Greenwich: fantasy settlements were imposed on ...”

“... quality – a little like Weegee’s – at once random and composed. In one, the circus director John Ringling North dominates the right half of the frame, shouting instructions to an unseen person, while above and to the left a high-wire act has two showgirls suspended from the wheels of a bicycle: the picture frame is divided by a balancing bar carried by ...”

“... English, or at least obstinately Amisian. Celts just don’t come like this. One of the book’s major themes is the very loss of national and racial identity: Wales and Welshness, it is said, hardly ‘exist’ now except as a form of charlatanism, or a bane. Yet, just as this lament has its own moral counterpoise – what the individual does not find ...”

“... eastwards (sometimes by rail), often to be better fed and cared for, however briefly, near a major centre of slaughter – almost always Chicago. Unlike the buffaloes, cattle were a marketable commodity. At the same time a division of labour was entailed in the handling of them.The new human relationship with cows was much more one-sided than that with ...”

“... procedures. Also about painters he admires (Titian, Rembrandt, Velásquez, Ingres, Matisse, Gwen John) and those he doesn’t: da Vinci (‘Someone should write a book about what a bad painter Leonardo da Vinci was’), Raphael and Picasso. He prefers Chardin to Vermeer, and dismisses Rossetti so violently as to induce pity. He is not just ‘the worst of ...”

“... they lived mostly in expatriate circles, but their friendships with other foreigners, including John McNair, the ILP representative in Barcelona, were rewarding. Lois was close to Eileen O’Shaughnessy (‘nice but very vaguish when she talks and is eternally smoking cigarettes’), who spent most of her time in the city while Orwell was at the front. In ...”

“... Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the abyss into which much of her correspondence fell. Her opening letter, written on 21 September 1693 when she ...”

“... to back charter schools and fight the teachers’ union. Sacks, a friend of Musk’s, is a major backer of right-wing candidates for national office and seemingly obsessed with urban crime.Another tech/venture capital billionaire and opponent of Boudin, Ron Conway, has long used his wealth to push San Francisco to the right. In 2010 he was a driving ...”

“... So it comes as a bigger shock than the salmonella scare (Edwina Currie, 1988) or the BSE scare (John Selwyn Gummer, 1990) to hear the latest strand in the table talk: that the era of endless food is winding down.This belief is new. Until recently the discussion was largely about quality. Quantity and availability only entered the picture when we wondered ...”

“... economies as Spain and Ireland, where construction has been the linchpin of recent growth. In the major Eurozone economies, on the other hand, where mortgages are not so central to financial markets, such effects have been more subdued. But, as the exposure of European banks to the collapse of sub-prime markets in the US is currently showing, the lines of ...”

“... Green Monster, Baxter the Bobcat, the Mariner Moose and other giant furry creatures who accompany major-league baseball teams from game to game, Palin is the adored mascot of the anti-fiscal crowd. Her actual performance as mayor and governor counts for little beside her capacity to keep the fans happy during the intervals between play, which she does in the ...”

“... on pop criticism: worship of lyrics as ‘poetry’, modelled on pop’s least representative major figure. This sort of writing fails the reality of pop: its special alchemy of lyrics that look like junk on the page, and music that seems underdeveloped when transcribed to a musical staff. Then there is the curse of arid musicology; and of Rolling ...”

“... Spender’s son Matthew was ten years old, he caught his hand in a car door. ‘The event,’ John Sutherland writes, ‘recalled other tragedies in the boy’s little life; the running over, for example, of his dog Bobby – a "rather lugubrious looking spaniel” and a present from his godmother, Edith Sitwell. Six-year-old Matthew had been disappointed ...”