“... all but impossible for anyone other than the very wealthy, with a property bubble that ‘shows no signs of abating’. The images they use to illustrate this are two advertisements on the Tube: ‘Dystopia 1: London as Theme Park’ is an ad for the Oyster card that shows a skyline full of helter-skelters and ferris wheels; ‘Dystopia 2: London as ...”

“... Both here and in his earlier study of the Edinburgh Review and his first volume on Macaulay, John Clive shows no desire to use or manipulate the Victorians. He merely wants to understand them better. And what he comes to understand, as G.M. Young did before him, is that the Victorian resolutely refuses to behave in the ...”

“... threat that, unless concessions were made to it, the PCF might run up the red flag over City Hall; the revision absolved the PCF of all responsibility should, for example, any Trotskyites among the marchers try to take matters into their own hands. The authorities, in their turn, would have responded within this well-understood, if unstated ...”

“... would turn Northern Ireland into an ‘economic semi-colony of the EU’ and damage the union. ‘No British Conservative government could or should sign up to it.’ There was every reason to disbelieve him, but the delegates stomped and cheered. He promised to spend billions on a bridge from Scotland to Co. Antrim – they believed that too.After ...”

“... in pastry, sixpence for the best kind of goose. But price and value were now distant relations. No one knew what things should cost, and market manipulation was rife. William Cokke, carrying some corn in his hand for show, walked round Newgate market talking loudly about the outrageous price of wheat, which he claimed could not be got for less than 21 pence ...”

“... The Reading Room of the British Museum is now completed, and if London had nothing but this hall of the blessed, scholars would make it well worth their while to make a pilgrimage here. All the sorrows of the outside would disappear in the mighty rotunda, and it is so quiet in this region of the eternal spirits that one can follow a thought into one’s inmost recesses ...”

“... New York is no longer a city of five boroughs with a village at its centre. The latest report of the US Conference of Mayors describes it as a megacity, with the metropolitan area absorbing surrounding counties in New Jersey and New York State. This is a city with a population of 18 million and a GDP of $1 trillion, just a little lower than Spain’s ...”

“... those Leicester evenings now thick with the whoosh and drone of the M1, the once innocent citizens no longer gathering spontaneously to pay rapt attention to a bird, but slumped at home watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? or surfing the Net for cheap holidays in Goa or the Gambia. The silence has certainly gone. There are now few places in Britain where ...”

“... long been an oasis. It was opened as a public park in 1958. Its scandals are old scandals and have no bearing on the current frenzy for makeovers, peppery paths, wooden obstacles for training circuits, laminated heritage notices. Spanking new carpets are woven for clapped-out football pitches, changing rooms erected to replace shower blocks opened in the dark ...”

“... X when he ghosted his autobiography? To what extent did Ted Sorensen create the verbal manner of John F. Kennedy when he wrote Profiles in Courage, a book for which the future president won the Pulitzer Prize? And are the science fiction stories H.P. Lovecraft ghosted for Harry Houdini not the best things he ever wrote? There would be a touch of all this in ...”

“... of the History of Parliament (devoted to the House of Commons from 1754 to 1790 and edited by John Brooke and Namier himself), admiration for the scholarship of that and subsequent volumes in this extraordinarily learned enterprise has regularly been accompanied by acute uncertainty as to what purpose it is supposed to fulfil. How far the painstaking ...”

“... for a while. “So?” “So?” “So?”’ – and so on. The narrator of Carry Me Down is John Egan, an overgrown 11-year-old, who wants to find a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the first ever human lie detector, or polygraph, as he prefers to think of himself. (Hyland’s adolescents have the autodidact’s love of big words.) Bad lies make ...”

“... After the narrative had done with them, they were like friends who go to live in another town: no less solid because out of view. A character like Plantagenet Palliser ducks in and out of novels for the best part of two decades, evolving between his appearances from odious young prig to noble old man. Like wine in the cellar, he was maturing, even when we ...”

“... One and Hum Two, as they’re called. You’re seen, then there’s a note on your desk, you have no idea who did the noting. Nor do the guards at each reading-room entrance who have cameras that spy on every desk, but they’re incredibly quick if you pull a pen from a pocket. Yesterday I ran into J who was drinking coffee with her friend B; today I meet ...”

“... The Saatchi Gallery, now to be found in the old County Hall building, spreads itself down long corridors and through ranks of offices. Many of these contain single works. Only in the big rotunda are a substantial number of pieces seen together – among them Damien Hirst’s very large anatomical model and Ron Mueck’s very small sculpture Dead Dad ...”