“... a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you cannot walk without ...”

“... use – it’ll be ‘pooled’. The Guardian is getting three British embed places. The briefing hall is crammed with journalists, photographers and camera operators. There are no windows. It’s close and humid. The US colonel doing the briefing keeps referring to ‘embedding for life’, meaning that journalists are expected to stick with their assigned ...”

“... story that induces, according to them, the sin that leads to their deaths Melville thus creates a hall of mirrors. He has contrived to have a character in his novel look forward to an evening over the books with a young lady he loves in which, during a scene of reading, they will look into a text where they will discover another romantic couple also involved ...”

“... a sartorial victory for his class during an exchange of words with Jacqueline Kennedy in the hall of the spectacularly grand Manhattan apartment to which she moved after her husband’s assassination. They had become friendly in the course of earlier meetings, once at a state dinner in the White House and another time, while she was still First Lady, at ...”

“... in his London flat. For nearly three months the newlyweds had to sleep separately, one in the hall, the other in a pantry; Russell, when he was in town, occupied the one bedroom. Eliot assured the supposedly anxious Russell that he should have no hesitation about remaining in the flat alone with Vivienne on the increasingly frequent occasions when Eliot ...”

“... of poisoned land, a couple of miles to the east of the Royal Naval College (film set, banqueting hall for hire, weddings a speciality), that is being prepared for its tent-show apocalypse, has never previously been part of the Greenwich story. The peninsula, if you check it out on a 19th-century map, is a vestigial tail, a pre-amputation stump known as ...”

“... so perhaps this was the kind of secret that people in Dublin were happy to know. After I read Richard Ellmann’s biography of Joyce in my twenties, I asked my mother about Eileen. She knew quite a lot about her mother’s friend. The Joyce family had lived locally for some years. Eileen had a flat in Mountjoy Square, where she stayed during the week, and ...”

“... said that a lodge, a drive and a ‘Keep Out’ sign was an invitation to trespass.)Hall Barn is of course atypical of Wiltshire’s 20th-century buildings. It is one of a small and variegated group that are exceptions to the dismal norm. Two of the best have been demolished: the Reliance Controls factory at Swindon by the structural engineer ...”

“... seem to have been both immediate and final, like the effects in his own books. In 1956 he reminded Richard Usborne, author of Clubland Heroes, of the source of a quotation. Smiling, the boy fell dead. Mr Usborne, really! I thought everyone knew Robert Browning’s poem ‘An Incident in the French Camp’. Young lieutenant comes to Napoleon with the news that ...”

“... by Goubert in the first instance as ‘of the British type’, was sometimes attached to the town hall as proof of the ‘democratisation of water’, but it was as a centre of social life – and of gossip – that it made its way from politics into literature. In Zola’s L’Assommoir there is a vivid account of ‘the wagging of tongues’ as the washing ...”

“... anti-malaria teams of making their roofs fall down by the use of DDT. Ensued incredulity, as Sir Richard Burton would say. The roofs were made of attap (palm fronds), and there was an attap-devouring caterpillar that dwelt in the roof. In normal conditions a parasitic wasp preyed on these pests and kept their numbers down, but the wasps were highly sensitive ...”

“... the ceremony would be ‘inconvenient’. Senna, a young Brazilian woman told the Independent’s Richard Williams, ‘was our hero. Our only one.’ Senna’s triumph, like Pele’s before him, was to have beaten the North at one of its own games. And the North, angry Brazilians wanted to believe, had killed him. A million or so of Sao Paulo’s 15 million ...”

“... Certainly Stoker’s dedication earned him little affection or respect. His friend the Manx writer Hall Caine said that he had ‘never seen, nor do I expect to see, such absorption of one man’s life in the life of another.’ Stoker’s was, he went on, ‘the strongest love that man may feel for man’. One might assume from this that Stoker was a ...”

“... all show and not much business. Early on, we’re often told, they were the constant butt of music-hall comedians (something to do, this, with George Robey who was apparently on Chelsea’s books once, as an amateur). There was even a popular ditty – ‘The day Chelsea went and won the Cup’ – which was taken to encapsulate the club’s special brand of ...”

“... minor characters in British literature who appear as workers, usually larger than life, like music hall artistes. Dickens, of course, could see the public entertainer in just about anybody, but he was unusual in making people expressive of their jobs, and his novels display a panorama of the gainfully employed. In his fiction, there are twelve merchants and ...”