“... by a mountain of a man dressed in a jellaba. He tells me to hurry up the stairs – the briefing may already have started. Upstairs is a large room with whitewashed walls and grey carpet tiles. On one of the walls a banner proclaims that there is no God but God. A panel of young, bearded men are sitting under the banner, facing a semi-circular swathe of TV ...”

“... correcting the error. It is striking that the two best-known recent English historians of France, Richard Cobb and Theodore Zeldin, have taken the national penchant for the whimsical and eccentric to extremes, as if so defeated by their subject they had to fall back, in compensation, on a parodic exhibition of French images of Anglicity, as so many ...”

“... reform programme got going, and speculates, plausibly in my view, that the North’s leaders may have been ‘lulled by the evidence of their successes’. In any case, within a very few years North Korea fell irrevocably behind. It happens that Martin and I were each given our first, closely chaperoned tour by the same person – Kim Jong-su. He ...”

“... to Senior Persons carrying out their professional responsibilities in a reckless manner, which may carry a prison sentence.’ This, as it was probably intended to, translated into tabloidese as ‘Jail Bad Bankers.’ These proposals would, I suspect, concentrate the minds of senior bankers if they became law. But that is quite a big ‘if’. Human ...”

“... for more than flashes of self-revelation. More recently, we have the eccentric cameos of Richard Cobb and causeries of A.J.P. Taylor, of which he said they were evidence that he had run out of historical subjects. In all, in the genre for which it seems so well designed, the craft of the historian has yielded perhaps only two classics – Gibbon’s ...”

“... We explored the territory together: the Bow Quarter development conjured from the Bryant & May match factory, the weaver’s garret occupied by David Rodinsky above a decommissioned synagogue in Princelet Street, and the first speculative (and doomed) ‘Montmartre meets Montserrat’ restaurant on Dalston Lane. Wright managed to get an entire book out ...”

“... by tenants of temple lands, and rations of barley due to temple workers. These credits and debits may have been calculated in silver shekels, but coins hardly circulated at the time. In other words, of the three functions ascribed to money by economics textbooks – a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value – it was the second that came ...”

“... by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar plantations worked by enslaved ...”

“... as by her profile. She seems to be looking down at Patrick, though he’s a head taller. Hassall may have used the 1832 miniature by William Thomson of a 22-year-old Gaskell, or perhaps Richmond’s 1851 drawing (there isn’t as much difference between them as twenty years ought to make). She may have made Gaskell up ...”

“... the early years his cocoa got a warrant from Queen Victoria but by 1861, when his sons George and Richard took over the factory, now in different premises, the business was on the brink. A new product the Cadburys had been counting on to turn things around, a drink called Iceland Moss, made of cocoa mixed with lichen, failed to find favour with the public.The ...”

“... opinions and rather narrow tastes. Nonetheless he was very good at teaching one how to write. He may have been wrong in some of his literary judgments and ignorant in some areas of literature but he was good at getting rid of what was superfluous or phoney in a piece of writing. And he would be very insulting if one came out with some bit of ...”

“... cultural barbarity of German Fascism with an extensive, decisive and clearly visible gesture. In May 1933, when ‘un-German’ books were being burned, Heinrich Mann’s were on the bonfire. Thomas Mann’s were not. He was still being protected by Bertram, among others. But his main protection was his own silence. In September the first issue of Die ...”

“... by high tariffs from global competition. The European Union has been good to farmers. This may now be coming to an end, for Britain may be about to leave. In 1973, when Britain entered the European Economic Community, the forerunner of the EU, everyone older than their early twenties could remember food ...”

“... blue, and a diminutive grey-haired person in a drab overall called Janey, a sort of helper who may have been a poor relation. I also remember a plump middle-aged Irish nanny in a white nurse’s cap looking after my baby sister and a taller and somewhat younger nanny in a felt hat who took me to Victoria Park to feed the deer. The new house was at 78 ...”

“... an extent that plagiarism becomes innovation, and reading itself a form of literary experiment. It may also not have been lost on Borges, and it is not lost on the reader, that ‘The Congress’ is not only a version of El Caudillo, but also a parody of Borges’s earlier work, playing with all his old tricks, using a deadpan narrative, full of recondite ...”