“... work. Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 incorporate passages of literary and art criticism (on John Ashbery’s poems, or Christian Marclay’s film The Clock) into their narratives, some of it taken almost verbatim from Lerner’s own published essays. It’s a remarkable thing to create a narrator who can credibly launch into actual written criticism in ...”

“... as Hugh Casson later wrote, was ‘a performance’. Few people felt they knew what lay behind it. John Betjeman knew more than most and was probably Lancaster’s closest friend. They met at Oxford and soon realised that they shared a sense of humour and a passion for architecture which was the basis of an enduring friendship. When Betjeman became assistant ...”

“... stool’. Danish blue made an occasional appearance too, which Jonathan liked but his father ‘took a dim view of because it didn’t taste of cow’. An altogether different list of cheese was supplied by the modern food industry, which Jonathan’s parents scorned while he ‘succumbed, shamefully, to Primula, Dairylea triangles, citric ...”

“... decadence, and can’t be understood through the writings of Fabian intellectuals or the plays of John Galsworthy.Heffer isn’t interested in new scholarship on the period unless it’s biographical. Hardly a page of this book is informed by developments in historical thinking since the 1970s; he makes his case using whatever materials come to hand most ...”

“... resentment that was mounting against postwar liberalism. This coalition drew support from the John Birch Society and the American Nazi Party, but also from working-class people affected by deindustrialisation, who often had roots in the same outer-borough neighbourhoods as the guards and the police. In 1970, a new union boss, Leo Zeferetti, steered COBA ...”

“... Her account supplements the existing European language scholarship on the Macartney saga by John Cranmer-Byng, Alain Peyrefitte, James Hevia, John Watt and others, redirecting our attention to those who did the real work of communicating.The Chinese world order (or ‘tributary system’) that Macartney sought to ...”

“... what was going on on the street because she was a kind of conduit’.It isn’t surprising that it took time to catch on. It was, after all, reversing a trend that had endured for centuries: the centrifugal pull of extra muros towards a chlorophyll-enriched life, an escape, a reaction to the grime and pollution of the cities. ‘If the noxious particles that ...”

“... solid chargehand’s tread and decent low voice as he rounded the corner with his workmate, John Armitage ...’ The parody seems to invite a warm-hearted review. What is wrong with it? The serious Hoggart snaps: ‘Epithets are used for their likely effect on the reader, not to catch the nature of what is being described.’ Such books are no use, with ...”

“... to reconcile herself to his view that Glover was his only conceivable successor. One candidate, John Rickman, Jones ruled out because he lacked sufficient force to be an effective administrator. Quoting a letter from Jones to Klein, dated 6 April 1941, in which Jones terms Glover ‘the only medical analyst who can appear before a non-analytic audience ...”

“... Westminster contained and reflected the realities of shire and family. Convictions and principles took a bad beating from which they are only now slowly recovering. Even those few acts of Parliament that the constitutionalists had emphasised tended to disappear from the discussion; what actually went on in Parliament seemed to matter so little that Namier ...”

“... of the Soviet system completed six months before Brezhnev’s death. There is one complete dud: John Hazard’s contribution on Soviet legal trends. A man who accepts as ‘fact’ the Soviet Supreme Court’s claim that criminality in the Soviet Union has diminished since 1940, and who gives his readers to understand that the Soviet authorities resort to ...”

“... John Wesley had a few words for Sterne: ‘For oddity, uncouthness, and unlikeness to all the world beside, I suppose the writer is without a rival.’ Well, something odd will do for ever if the sensation-seekers have their way; Tristram Shandy has outlasted Johnson’s Dictionary, even in the classroom. Sterne was the first author to come up with fully explicatable – as distinct from explicable – texts, in English fiction anyway ...”

“... but perhaps wouldn’t have recounted it too often since he subsequently swallowed his pride and took the job.’ His tone often slips, however, in a way which is pertinent to irony as preternatural vigilance, when he lets enter his engaging self. ‘The awkward dodging to left and to right when two people meet in the street’ was unmasked ...”

“... Westminster seat, in a by-election protest vote in 1945. But Winnie Ewing’s victory in Hamilton took a very safe seat out of Labour’s grip. The defeat, according to a contemporary Nationalist observer, Oliver Brown, sent a shiver along the Labour benches ‘looking for a spine to run up’. The Scottish Labour vote was managed at this point by Willie ...”

“... diary extracts were used to accompany an exhibition of her husband’s photographs). The couple took the Smithsons and Paolozzi on ethnographic tours around the impoverished, bomb-damaged streets, where they were tutored in what the Hendersons saw as the vibrant theatre of working-class life. The Smithsons said that these ‘compulsive walks’ were ‘the ...”