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“... naval squadron bombarded the coast at Acre, in what is now Israel, and effectively put an end to Napoleon’s dream of marching on to India in the wake of Alexander the Great. Two centuries later, another demonstration of ‘shock and awe’ lit up the night skies over Baghdad and started the latest and most ill-fated ...”

“... Is​ there an 18th-century writer to rival Oliver Goldsmith? Who else achieved lasting popular and critical success in all three major genres? The Vicar of Wakefield has never been out of print; The Deserted Village was a schoolroom favourite well into the 20th century; and She Stoops to Conquer is still performed ...”

“... a decline in public housing and the proliferation of office blocks, the inhabitants of the area to the east of the South Bank Centre began to organise to defend their homes. In 1984, with support from Ken Livingstone and the GLC, they fought off the property developers, founded housing ...”

“... Peter Hennessy’s new book hasn’t persuaded me that its central preoccupation, the current dispute over prime ministerial power and its extent, is not sterile and, indeed, rather boring – yet it is a splendid read. The truth is that the Westminster system is quite inadequately democratic and transparent, and Hennessy is, if anything, too respectful and conventional in his proposals about how the office might be reformed ...”

“... I’m sometimes told that the Scots don’t like Thatcherism,’ Margaret Thatcher told the Scottish Conservative Conference in 1988. ‘Well, I find that hard to believe – because the Scots invented Thatcherism, long before I was thought of.’ The Scot she meant was Adam Smith, a figure popularly identified as the founder of economics, an apostle of capitalism and honoured prophet of the new right ...”

“... Aren’t you tired​ of them? One hears nothing else nowadays.’ The peevish Mrs Snowdon, a character in Mary Louisa Molesworth’s ‘The Story of the Rippling Train’ (1887), is grumbling about the popularity of ghost stories. Nevertheless, she is gripped by the one that follows. Accounts of the supernatural proliferated in the 19th century, as the certainties of orthodox religion were undermined and the hard realities of industry and commerce became increasingly oppressive ...”

“... edition, published in January 1728, sold out in a few weeks. This stir of interest had little to do with Theobald’s reputation as a playwright, which was rather middling: his most recent employment was as a librettist of light operatic pantomimes. Nor was it due to the drawing power of the celebrated Barton Booth, who ...”

“... maybe, too, a significant subtext. Fabulous like a fable in the making. A fabulous opportunity, to pluck these no-hopers out of their airless oubliette and plant them somewhere entirely new. A fabulous creation, from the ground up. Fables per Aesop or La Fontaine often involve sudden and unlikely transformation: a burst of speech from creatures we never ...”

“... bittersweet hyperbole flowed by, as the BBC declared its love. Westminster sympathisers were heard to say that the warrior queen was the country’s greatest peacetime prime minister, if not the best of all. She was to receive a funeral of the sort that buried the Queen Mother, and had wished for no grander ceremonial ...”

“... is the 16th book about Laurence Olivier, and his foreword tells of two more biographers, John Cottrell and Garry O’Connor, too intent on their own deadlines to discuss their common quarry with him. All this activity may puzzle the lay person. Holden’s final pages report Olivier alive, as well as can be expected ...”

“... For​ Leavers at least, the morning of 1 February ought to have been like ‘swimmers into cleanness leaping’ (though, come to think of it, that didn’t go so well the first time). For Remainers, it was always going to be a case of ‘ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain,/On the bald street breaks the blank day ...”

“... People​ said things about Karl, but not often to his face. He might like the things or he might not, and that did not always depend on whether they were intended as compliments or the opposite. Personal remarks could be returned with interest, hot or cold. Whichever way, he remembered them with accuracy.I can think of two personal remarks about Karl, in his early years, which reached him and went down well ...”

“... and the world’s largest flower. ‘Without 1819, we may never have been launched on the path to nationhood as we know it today,’ the prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, declared at the festivities. His father, Lee Kuan Yew – Singapore’s second founding father – would have agreed. When he took power at the head of the anti-colonial People’s Action ...”

“... 200th anniversary of the United States constitution, Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to sit on the US Supreme Court, delivered a hugely controversial speech. Noting the quasi-religious reverence in which the framers of the constitution are held in America, Marshall expressed some scepticism about routine proclamations of their ...”

“... There’s​ no better ballast for a fantasy narrative, something solid to keep all the impossible elements grounded (time travel, biodrones), than a numbered bus route: ‘the 88 bus passes by noisily’; ‘the 214 bus from Pratt Street to Old Street’. In Sterling Karat Gold, the Goldsmiths Prize winning novel of 2021, Isabel Waidner showed a shrewd sense of how to balance registers ...”