“... together, ‘peeling off the kilometres to the tune of “Blue Skies”, sizzling down the long black liquid reaches of National Sept, the plane trees going sha-sha-sha through the open windows’. The writing is genuinely alive with what Connolly called ‘erotic nostalgia’. Both Powell and Michael Shelden emphasise his capacity for ...”

“... least architecturally, is St Mary’s, a medieval parish church with a graveyard and alms-houses. Ian Nairn described it as a ‘huge surprise in the endless late Victorian bow fronts of London-across-the-Lea … as diverse as the characters in a saloon bar’. I went to a service there a couple of years ago but slunk away when the tambourines were handed ...”

“... a sounding of doubt that was lost in his transcription. Now, in a new critical edition by Ian Forrest and Christopher Whittick, the visitation book is available in full translation for the first time.* As they write: ‘It is not an objective record of what was happening in medieval parishes, being in fact much more fascinating than that.’ In 1397 ...”

“... at the bottom of the credits of a Peter Fonda biker movie, was the acceptable face of the black economy. He mingled with poets who dealt sugar-lumps laced with LSD. He met R.D. Laing, Lyall Watson and became involved with P.J. Proby’s management. He was, so he says, ‘trying to create an alternative society, like all the other arseholes.’ Which ...”

“... read. Smile brightly. Bluff like a politician in a glass booth being manipulated by semaphoring black-suited attendants with clipboards. So? ‘All for the best in the best of all possible Londons,’ says the mayor, says the minister, says Joanna Lumley. ‘All for the best,’ say the entitled, the connected, the stakeholders, the investors and the ...”

“... France had moved on, but Modiano, the son of a Jewish businessman who had made his living on the black market during the Occupation and a Flemish actress who worked in the Nazi film industry, could not. He was so consumed by the history of Occupied Paris, the city where his parents had met, that he felt as if he had memories of it, although he was born in ...”

“... four days of bright, sometimes windy, sometimes cloudy, English summer, along with a century from Ian Bell, an Australian revival and a match that swung each way from session to session. But on the fourth afternoon, a spell of fast bowling from Stuart Broad turned a promising run-chase into an Aussie collapse. After the fall of Brad Haddin’s wicket, the ...”

“... just a small team left to protect the core leadership from assassination.’ It looked as though Ian Paisley’s DUP and Sinn Féin were about to do a deal on decommissioning, and that Stormont, the Northern Irish Assembly, would be resumed. In October 2002 four Sinn Féin government officials (one of them the party’s chief administrator at Stormont, the ...”

“... rather remarkable correspondence with a nun called Sister Lawrentia. Her disapproval of his Little Black Girl in Search of God upset him, and when he asked her to pray for him he obviously meant it. A report of her death proving false, he remarked that he felt ‘a soul had been dragged back from felicity. Which is queer, as of course I don’t believe ...”

“... the colonel, who had suspected him all along for a ‘pink-eyed weakling’. Grann brings out the black comedy of these scenes, where amid harrowing tropical hardships Murray is scolded for having scoffed some communal caramels. Fawcett’s preferred sidekick was Henry Costin, a trusty batman figure who called him ‘chief’. A former corporal and gym ...”

“... are not people at all but cuttlefish in human form: you have only to touch them, and they emit a black cloud.’ The former Yugoslavia has indeed given Ugrešić a specific case which can be used to examine contrapuntally the world she has roamed for the last 20 years, with its migrant workers, refugees, tribalism, faith politics, identity politics, consumer ...”

“... they can be so deeply buried in the mind that it is as if they have never existed: ‘Total black; hours lost, never to be retrieved.’ Rachel is a lost soul: ‘My better angels lost again, defeated by drink, by the person I am when I drink.’ ‘I lost and I drank and I drank and I lost.’ This despite the fact that, to the immense irritation of ...”

“... A chapter of Backroom Boys tracks the process by which two Cambridge students, David Braben and Ian Bell, used elegant mathematical fixes to get round the limited memory available on home computers in the early 1980s while writing an epoch-making computer game, Elite: Whether the components are atoms or bits, ideas or steel girders, building something is a ...”

“... shows a doubtful sense of what’s what. Ann Fleming was married for 12 not very happy years to Ian Fleming, with whom she’d been infatuated for most of her life. Her previous husbands, Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail, and Lord O’Neill, never counted for much, though she had had a glamorous life with Rothermere and had been in love with him ...”

“... in exhaustive study of the primary sources, is now the standard work and must stand alongside Ian Kershaw’s Hitler, Ulrich Herbert’s Best and Robert Gerwarth’s Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich as one of the landmark Nazi biographies. As the author of a celebrated study of the Holocaust, Longerich is better able than his predecessors to ...”