“... who quarried it seems much more evocative than the actual wall itself. Instead we buy a couple of George III country chairs very reasonably in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close ...”

“... glare of summer, trying to avoid the ‘garbage, dung, stench and slander’ of the place, as George Seferis described it, ‘the pestering flies, the beggars, the street salesmen who pushed things in their faces … the yelling, the hooting, the screeching brakes, the clanging of tram-cars and howl of tram-horns’. Lawrence Durrell, who had been living ...”

“... dialect verb ‘chitteth’ (‘provincial and almost obsolete’, his devoted Victorian editor, George Offor, wrongly noted). The verb chit is commonly used by gardeners to mean ‘to sprout’, and there is also a suggestion of another meaning – ‘to chirp’ – which lends a new-hatched quality, added to the diminutive, sometimes slightly derogatory ...”

“... Open City starts firmly anchored in time and place: ‘From the intersection of 172nd Street, the George Washington Bridge came into view for the first time, its lights soft yellow points in the grey distance. I walked past small shops selling knickknacks, the sprawling window displays of El Mundo Department Store, and the perpetually popular restaurant El ...”

“... SO15 counterterrorism unit. Some of the stories obtained this way were trivial, though intrusive: George Michael wept in his jail cell, for example, or a male British Airways worker secretly wore high heels. Others were more serious: security lapses at Heathrow, or equipment shortages in Afghanistan. Almost anything could be obtained if the offer was big ...”

“... for the left-ear hearing loss or for the pain in the back of my ears that had started the whole ball rolling. The ENT thought it might have been from clenching my teeth in my sleep. (The pain was mostly noticeable first thing in the morning.) It still happens at times, but I’ve learned to ignore it.Meanwhile, the hearing in my left ear worsened, and the ...”

“... Yet BSkyB, which had outbid ITV for exclusive live television rights, proclaimed it ‘A Whole New Ball Game’ on its billboards. In 1994 came the landmark signing of a foreign superstar, the German World Cup winning striker Jürgen Klinsmann, by Spurs. The following year Arsenal bought Holland’s Dennis Bergkamp, and Middlesbrough, of all places, recruited ...”

“... low haunts? Unfortunately, the most frequently attributed notebooks in the new atlas are those of George Duckworth. Duckworth is now chiefly remembered as the half-brother who regularly molested Virginia Woolf and was pilloried in her memoirs as a ‘man of pure convention’. From 1892 to 1902 he was Charles Booth’s unpaid private secretary and in his ...”

“... stage of her adult life: they also provide a running commentary on her times. She is a witness to George III’s derangement in 1788, sequestered with him and the Queen in the Palace at Kew. She attends the trial of Warren Hastings. She experiences the Napoleonic regime first-hand during an enforced stay in France between 1803 and 1812. In her teens and ...”

“... you hold the line if we fail?’ ‘Yes,’ the GOC replied, ‘provided I can use ball’ – live ammunition. ‘In the light of that,’ the chief constable replied, ‘the position is untenable.’ But had the march not gone down the Garvaghy Road, Trimble would have been destroyed, and with him any prospect of an inclusive settlement. The ...”

“... left for Munich, the bohemian and artistic capital of Germany, where he mingled with the Stefan George circle, saw Alexander Sacharoff dance with his face painted violet, fell into a woman’s arms at the end of Carnival, and returned to England to live in the Old Vicarage, Grantchester. In his absence Virginia had become close friends with Ka Cox, and soon ...”

“... of the previous three books as The Dunciad in Four Books; the hero was now no longer Theobald but George II’s Poet Laureate, Colley Cibber. In what form are we to read the thing? It cannot live entirely without modern annotation, for it is full of particular characters and particular animosities; it is dense with Grub Street lore, which we are offered the ...”

“... in gross annual sales. Two years later, Junius joined the London-based Anglo-American bank of George Peabody and Co (later to become J.S. Morgan and Co), buying and selling American securities, offering brokerage and general banking services, trading on its own account, and promoting promising new ventures – notably, in 1856, the Atlantic Telegraph ...”

“... hold a violin, the Chloe Kelly in that council block who will never hear the roar as she slams a ball into an open goal. For Reid, fairness would only come through social revolution. For Briggs, it was through knowledge: an eruption of public education whose lava would overflow all the conventional boundaries of elitist schooling and narrowly academic ...”

“... choice and in its way a momentous one. Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work. As it was, with this one she soon became engrossed and, passing her ...”