“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... My father had no gun, or any land to shoot over. So when he decided that it was time for me, then aged 15 or 16, to learn how to shoot, he had to cadge. We borrowed an old 12-bore from a local farmer, a rickety weapon the lock, stock and barrel of which were barely connected, and my father then asked his neighbour, Siegfried Sassoon, who lived in the next village, whether we could loose off a few cartridges in his woods ...”

“... Thousand Brian Enos!’ Row upon row, little plant-pot bulbs of his smiling face, pegged out to the horizon. There was transparent sheeting as a guard against the frost, played about by a shimmer of soft artificial lights. What was this? Was it Art? Nature? Some kind of installation? And what did all those identical Enos smell like?Eno has haunted me for ...”

“... Daily News and Daily Chronicle, surviving or even thriving on circulations well under 50,000. To call them ‘quality’ or ‘serious’ morning papers was superfluous, as there were no others, until the great challenge – and the terrible portent – of 1896, when Alfred Harmsworth launched the Daily Mail at a halfpenny, far brighter and brasher, and ...”

“... The subtlest​ of insults to Scotland is, it seems, to return to it,’ Neal Ascherson wrote in the Scottish political review Q in 1975. The historian Christopher Harvie described the emigrant intellectuals who pepper Scottish history as ‘red Scots’: ‘cosmopolitan, self-avowedly “enlightened” and, given a chance, authoritarian, expanding into and exploiting greater and more bountiful fields than their own country could provide ...”

“... its sequels, dried her eyes and blown her nose, resolved that ‘the only honourable course was to come out into the open and admit that the dreadful books are masterpieces.’ She did it, though, ‘with some bad temper and hundreds of reservations’. It isn’t an uncommon reaction. These works, and many others, are ...”

“... sense of merely odd, or strange, but weird as Shakespeare might have meant it: ‘having the power to control the fate or destiny of men’, ‘partaking or suggestive of the supernatural’ (OED). Weird, too, in the way that Tennyson meant it, particularly as the word appears in his poem ‘The Princess’. The visitor ...”