“... Calcutta, figuring as it does an open, silent mouth, no longer refers to the historical event that took place in the 18th century in which English men, women and children were trapped by Indian soldiers in a small, suffocating cell in the city. It refers to the unsayable that lay, and still often lies, at the heart of the colonial encounter, the breakdown in ...”

“... early this century – so Halldór Laxness, the Nobel Prize winner, records – an Icelander took his daughter to a book-shop to buy her a copy of Örvar-Odds saga. But the old bookseller told him he’d do much better with Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, with its hero Umslopogaas, ‘in his own way a great man, and in my opinion no whit ...”

“... the managers of the Farm Security Administration camps to writers, artists and intellectuals, like John Steinbeck, the FSA photographers Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, folklorists working for the Library of Congress, the economist Paul Taylor, the sociologist Carey McWilliams, and even Woodie Guthrie, who provided the words and music. The migrants were ...”

“... dealer called Oreese Stevenson; inside, they found $21,500 and half a kilo of cocaine. Jenkins took Stevenson’s keys and went to his house, where he found guns, more cocaine and bags of money. He didn’t have a search warrant. He called a friend, Donny Stepp, and told him to come over. Stepp was a bail bondsman and drug dealer who had spent time in ...”

“... Recovery, a rope cinched tightly around her right ankle. She is defenceless and exposed. Captain John Kimber seems to be taking pleasure in her pain. He is corpulent, grotesque. We do not know the girl’s name. Nor did the crew who watched or assisted in her torture. They called one of her fellow captives Venus, which of course had no meaning in the village ...”

“... Andrew McCarthy, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Molly Ringwald – almost any actor who appeared in a John Hughes teen film qualified). The Literary Brat Pack was a journalistic readymade, roping together a number of writers who may have scarcely known each other and treating them as a floating soirée. It was cartoonish and unfair to most of the individuals ...”

“... at only about 50-70 per cent, none of them died during a Moon-landing mission, though Apollo 1 took the lives of three men on the launch-pad and Apollo 13 barely made it back after having to abort an attempt at landing. Hard-to-interpret Chinese ambitions apart, there are no active plans for further lunar landings, and so, more than thirty years on, these ...”

“... attempted for matters of weddings, christenings, churches, eating white bread’, the King took time to respond, then demanded unqualified submission, which, given the military situation, was, Hoyle tells us, ‘nonsense’. Henry VIII had complained that the Pilgrims’ articles were ‘dark, general and obscure’. The North responded with the ...”

“... Strachey found something of the same attraction in Newton’s older contemporary, the biographer John Aubrey. Strachey saw himself as the product of an ‘embryonic generation’ almost as remote now from the Victorians as Aubrey had been from the Middle Ages, yet as Aubrey was haunted by the lost world of medieval magic, so Strachey and the other club ...”

“... daring of her escape to London, where, with the help of a beloved governess, Helen Rootham, she took a flat in Pembridge Mansions, Bayswater. Here she and Rootham lived on a grudging and uncertain allowance from Sir George, plus what they could earn. Thereafter, Sitwell was always short of money and as each generation passed she was left or positively ...”

“... compass, depending on which direction most appealed to me at the time. The first of these walks took me northeast up the Lea Valley, through Epping Forest, then followed a long path called the Essex Way that traversed the surprisingly deep country well to the north of the Thames corridor, before I debouched through Dedham Vale and the Stour Estuary to ...”

“... in homage to his autobiography. But present-day readers seem to feel much as Auden did, when he took up Davies for a few weeks as a schoolboy, ‘without finding what I really wanted’. The copy of Later Days I looked at in the London Library (most of his works now being out of print) is full of exasperated marginalia – ‘vulgar’, ‘silly’, ‘you ...”

“... and eventually shopped her to the BBC, but a consultant from Belfast’s Mater Hospital, who took a career break shortly after her remarks were made. Selwyn Black has lectured in counselling at the University of Ulster, and his Christian background is that he has also worked as a Methodist minister and RAF chaplain. He specialised in the victims of ...”

“... newspapers we knew that Europe was the future; its parliament, if not exactly sexy, at least made John Major’s backbenchers foam at the mouth. And maybe Derrida’s trademarked ‘always already’, or Barthes’s writer who ‘can only imitate a gesture that is … never original’, spoke with more than usual force, in those end-of-historyish times, to ...”

“... nationalism had gone on long enough. Chile’s nationalisations, Nixon’s Treasury secretary, John Connally, said, threatened to provoke a ‘snowballing’ of similar expropriations throughout the region, which Washington could no longer afford to deal with in a ‘piecemeal fashion’. There was a metaphysics of Allende-hating that went beyond matters ...”