“... His family had been established in Norfolk since the late 14th century; his father, Sir Richard, was a cloth merchant (or mercer), who had thrived first on the patronage of Cardinal Wolsey and then of Thomas Cromwell, and had been knighted for his success in procuring foreign loans. Richard even had the nerve to ...”

“... spend in opposition. Roy Jenkins’s Asquith, Anthony Crosland’s reflections on socialism, Richard Crossman’s Bagehot, would hardly have come out of Whitehall, and Michael Manley would not have found time to write a history of West Indian cricket which encompasses the social, economic and regional problems of the Caribbean if he had been engaged in ...”

“... which, he explains in the first stanza, he had visited ten years earlier: and the waterfall was white in the dark, just like a unicorn prancing: the moths flew around among the flowers which were raised high, or among the stars – the stars that hung low like ripe barberries. And I remember I exclaimed: ‘Life is higher than grief, deeper than ...”

“... the 1820s, when, as the historian Gillian Weiss has shown, a panic about the sexual enslavement of white women paved the way for the French invasion of Algeria. Rumours of ‘white slavery’ – that white women were being kidnapped and sold in the Orient – were revived more than a ...”

“... land at Wardenclyffe on the northern shore of Long Island, and commissioned the architect Stanford White to build a laboratory like no other on earth. In the few years that Tesla occupied Wardenclyffe, it stood as a great work of science fiction, a counterpart of Wells’s time machine or Frankenstein’s laboratory which had, somehow, made it off the page. A ...”

“... Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon was closed. But around 11 a.m. a girl called Eileen White noticed ‘an awful lot of smoke’ pouring from the back of the building. When she told her aunt she was reassured that it was only ‘Mr Gisbourne’s bonfire’. An hour later, the theatre manageress, Alice Rainbow, was finally warned that the building ...”

“... a flat that was something of a miniature Versailles. Immediately above lived the widow of Richard Wright, author of Native Son. Above above, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, known to outsiders as Le Corbusier. At the end of the courtyard, the house – la maison – and this calls for historical extrapolation. At some moment in the latter half of the 17th ...”

“... to say that these three are ‘well-known anthropologists’ is a bit like saying that Vanna White is a well-known lexicographer. To be fair, each of them did something that was a genuine contribution to anthropology, but the rest was docudrama and self-promotion. The discipline seems particularly vulnerable to this form of exhibitionist exuberance, and ...”

“... 1866 the Leavenworth Times denounced the formulation as ‘disagreeably grammatical’; Strunk and White’s 1979 edition of Elements of Style, the revered American style manual, declared ‘he or she’ ‘boring or silly’. Today ‘he or she’ doesn’t even have the virtue of being grammatical, disagreeably or not, because ‘everyone’ includes ...”

“... ends. Four years of rage and lies; four years of racism and xenophobia so coarse and inflammatory Richard Nixon might have blushed; four years of dismantling economic and environmental regulation, packaged as a populist revolution on behalf of the forgotten (white) American; four years of ‘law and ...”

“... for Bertie, as Edward VII, went on to introduce the dinner jacket, the velvet smoking jacket, the white dresscoat and the bowler hat. He also fell in love, temporarily, with Lillie Langtry, whose velvet-slippered friend Oscar Wilde said that ‘where there is no extravagance there is no love.’ These days the male fashionistas get to drink champagne in the ...”

“... off her stays by the water’s edge and never wore them again’, and was remembered in flowing white robes by a girl from Glasgow: ‘the first grown-up I had ever seen wearing bare feet and sandals.’ The marriage was, eventually, consummated, and the first of four daughters was born in 1911. The family and her own work began to take up more and more of ...”

“... that she saw those long nights through bedded on stone and straw; that women in the garden by the White Tower, turned to one another, amazed: ‘What is that animal?’                                                                                      The river beat, hour ...”

“... The US defence and intelligence community launched a pre-emptive strike at George Bush and Richard Cheney on 3 December. The new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released that day concluded: ‘We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons programme.’ So Iran will not be the next target of this administration after all ...”

“... Richard Rogers’s new Lloyd’s building in London has begun business, to predictable complaints. A Guardian journalist asking for off-the-cuff comments from underwriters found them grumpy – the only appreciative voice was foreign and female. That is not surprising: the new Lloyd’s is an architectural statement of un-English vehemence ...”