“... on those very rare instances of dreams or horoscopes that appear to ‘come true’, as some must do under the law of averages, and to ignore the countless others which turn out to be groundless and are instantly forgotten. The Hot Hand, like astrology, is a fallacy, though there is some argument about whether or not it is an ‘adaptive’ fallacy, i.e. one ...”

“... Trevelyan, then in another he is the thinking man’s Lord Mountbatten. No one can travel so much, do so much or write so much without attracting his detractors: the greater the achievement, the larger the target. Compared with his immediate contemporaries, Briggs’s writing lacks the combative forcefulness of G.R. Elton, the olympian grandeur of Owen ...”

“... Lewis Carroll. (The fact that the latter also represented the indisputable nadir in the career of David Bowie is, for the purposes of this review, neither here nor there.) In the film Dreamchild, the cinematic meditation on the life of the real Alice directed by Gavin Millar and scripted by Dennis Potter, Henson was the obvious choice to supply the puppets ...”

“... a different awareness of some of the issues. Whatever happens to ships or governments, countries do not sink. In his Britain and Argentina in the 19th Century, published in 1960, Professor H. S. Ferns gives this summary: ‘The dispute between Britain and Argentina concerning what one nation calls the Falkland Islands and the other Las Islas Malvinas is now ...”

“... as the guests were leaving the table for coffee, they spotted Rossellini, tiptoeing through the hall. He went straight to bed. Miss Bergman, desperate, tried to get him to come downstairs. ‘Tell them I didn’t come home,’ he suggested unhelpfully. She was left to return to the living-room to make impossible excuses, when suddenly the double doors were ...”

“... other little-known large paintings which were also probably made for the portego or large central hall of Venetian palaces. (In such paintings the lighting would correspond with that of the room: thus those on the wall to the left of the window overlooking the canal would be lit from the right, as is the case with the Bordone and the Schiavone.) In no earlier ...”

“... After his dismal performance at the battle of Saintes in 1242, his bitterest enemy, Simon de Montfort, said to his face: ‘It would be a good thing if you were taken and shut away, as was done to Charles the Simple. There are houses with iron bars at Windsor that would be good for imprisoning you securely.’Henry was also affectionate by nature and ...”

“... On 18 July​ 2003, the body of the weapons inspector David Kelly was found in the woods on Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire, two months after he’d revealed that the Blair administration had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Rachel Wells, the central character in Number 11 and the narrator of the first of its five overlapping stories, was ten when Kelly’s body was discovered ...”

“... Isabelle and their most intense memory was the arrival, at the end of the year, of the livres de prix. They hid themselves, and read every book. But though the dreaming reader persisted in Henri, he became tough and intransigent. He was sent to the Lycée Voltaire and didn’t like it, started to train for the Navy and didn’t like it, prepared for the ...”

“... I was told on New Year’s Day by a ski-mask (as opposed to a rank-and-file bandana), ‘you’d have to be in Reality.’ I was certainly in the wrong place, at Oventic rather than La Realidad, misled by assurances that I would find the local leader, Comandante David; I was stranded where not much was happening for the ...”

“... if they had played for teams that did the business every week? Much of their appeal has been to do with the uncertainty, the recklessness they seem to generate: in their opponents but also in their team-mates. In the presence of a Zola, average players tend to get above themselves. Now and then this can pay off: above themselves, they play accordingly. More ...”

“... was used for so long to reinforce ideas of white European superiority, it still has the power to do this even though the era of slavery and empire is officially over, even though majority-white countries support ethnic pluralism as a concept. It drives discrimination and degradation in these countries, and serves to normalise the continuing military and ...”

“... murder is wrong – which it was, even then – but because it’s politically expedient to do so. In Sansom’s novels, affairs of state are more than stage dressing: they are the soil in which the plot grows.As Shardlake investigates, peasants tired of talk start ripping down hedges. There is news of rebel camps appearing in the Home ...”

“... offered the chance of putting Life off a little longer by staying on, as I thought vaguely ‘to do research’, though into what I had no idea. In quest of a supervisor and also a subject I paid a disastrous visit to Beryl Smalley at St Hilda’s, thinking I might do something on the Franciscans. There had been a ...”

“... altogether reasonable, but not as if it needs a special word. What the concept actually seems to do is to convert a complex bundle of morally ambiguous habits into a virtue: it is pragmatism in its best possible light. The Vicar of Bray wouldn’t have seny, nor would your ordinary malleable politician, but a slave-owning Catalan who built a handsome church ...”