“... Arthur’s face … ‘Now for Fred,’ said Hugh … [His] composition seemed to me to miss its mark. Those babbling puppets with their inane inconsequent talk had no individuality; there was nothing in them … But here was my mother for the third time wiping tears of joy from her eyes … ‘Oh, you clever people!’ said my mother. ‘Why don’t you all ...”

“... as champions of plain-speaking in Shakespeare are usually Machiavellian hypocrites (Richard III, Mark Antony, Iago), while the only one to call himself a ‘true-born Englishman’ is Henry Bolingbroke, en route to usurping the throne. Just as strikingly, the one character who appeals to the notion of ‘the King’s English’ is Mistress Quickly in The ...”

“... express his admiration. Now Carlyle met and disapproved of Lamb, Godwin, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Francis Jeffrey of the Edinburgh Review and Charles Buller were old friends, and Irving too, though Irving – now a popular preacher absorbed in miracle cures and speaking in tongues (‘hoo-ing and ha-ing’) – was making Carlyle increasingly uneasy. Mill he ...”

“... more wrong. Had he qualified his assertion with ‘in fifty years’ he might have been nearer the mark. He was also mistaken when he wrote four years earlier of the ‘fading influence’ of Stockholm City Hall, the most scrutinised building of the period. Summerson’s predictions proved to be no more than wishfulness founded in the conviction that the true ...”

“... with a woman like Gemma Galgani? Like her medieval predecessors, she received the stigmata, the mark of Christ’s wounds. Like them, she was beaten up by devils. Like them, she performed miracles of healing after her death. When you look at her strange life, you wonder what kind of language you can use to talk about her – through which discipline will ...”

“... still unaccustomed role of global superpower show a strong family resemblance. ‘History,’ as Mark Twain noted, ‘doesn’t often repeat itself; but it rhymes.’ I first saw Vietnam in November 1966, on assignment from the pre-Murdoch Sunday Times. I arrived in Saigon with a letter from my editor I could easily have written myself, and a hazy idea of ...”

“... could bear to swim municipally? Tomorrow we leave as the house is now sold, putting me in mind of Francis Hope’s poem about the holidays we had in rented villas back in the 1970s: Goodbye to the Villa Piranha Prepare the journey North, Smothering feet in unfamiliar socks. Sweeping the bathroom free of sand, collecting Small change of little worth. Make ...”

“... Friedman claimed that postwar Japan and South Korea were exemplars of open, competitive markets; Francis Fukuyama credited the prewar successes of Germany and Japan to ‘economic liberalism’. It’s also true that the social question did not until recently seem as critical in Anglo-America as in late-developing nations. Britain, the first major ...”

“... quotations or dismiss them as self-indulgent distractions or pointless jokes, which misses the mark.The postwar bebop jazzmen employed musical quotations even more often than Ellington. Charlie Parker frequently concludes fast-paced, hard-swinging numbers by stopping on a dime and gaily quoting – out of tempo, with leisurely elegance – from Percy ...”

“... absorbed and plotted; he interpreted the stages of the Hole’s active life as a future manifesto. Mark Morgan, an excavation theorist, biding his time on the edge of the gathering in the candlelit room, revealed that he had made a calculation, based on the value per square metre of towers going up in Hackney, and basements being hacked out, that every pint of ...”

“... from the visitor visa forms I’ve looked at: Pakistan asks you to supply an ‘identification mark’, and state your blood group, religion and history of military service. Burma relies on a self-description: you must state the colour of your hair and eyes, your height and your ‘complexion’. The Democratic Republic of Congo asks that you supply ...”

“... novelist, and wickedest of wits Mary McCarthy, who told Susan she smiled too much, the telltale mark of a provincial. McCarthy was also reputed to have said to Sontag, ‘I hear you’re the new me,’ and, to others, ‘She’s the imitation me,’ digs that made their way round the cocktail circuit and into print. The soundbites had plausibility because ...”

“... of readers, Bury My Heart set the tone for nearly half a century of historiography. From Francis Jennings’s The Invasion of America (1975) to Benjamin Madley’s An American Genocide (2016), the subject of this scholarly outpouring has been the destruction of Native peoples at the hands of the British and US empires and their proxies. More ...”

“... reservations, international agreements would be impossible. French diplomatic maxim Christopher Francis Patten, Hong Kong’s last governor, famously wept just before he left aboard the royal yacht Britannia at midnight on 30 June, while sirens whooped and rockets soared over Asia’s most stunning harbour. Tears of joy? Relief? Despair? The book he is ...”

“... of new private homes built each year didn’t go up. It barely budged from the 150,000 a year mark. The market failed. There was increasing demand without increasing supply. Mid-boom, as the imbalance between the number of people chasing a house and the supply of new homes reached a tipping point, average house prices took off like a rocket, trebling ...”