“... Mrs de Quincey withdrew Thomas from the school. The reasons for this are obscure, although Leslie Stephen, in his entry for the Dictionary of National Biography, stresses that she felt Thomas had become ‘vain’ in his learning. It was clearly a damaging thing to do, and may have contributed to de Quincey’s opting, in his mature prose style, for the ...”

“... the hundred or so stanzas of Childe Harold, Canto IV in English), Bismarck, Nietzsche, and mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, who may even have taken Byron’s epicene hero Sardanapalus as a model of regal behaviour. The books by Hermione de Almeida and Philip Martin are much more direct attempts to meet the challenge Byron makes to the literary critic. If he is ...”

“... river near Vauxhall Bridge where the River Effra meets the Thames, Troia Nova became Trinovantum; King Lud, who legend has it is buried at Ludgate, renamed it Caer Ludein.’ Taylor is open and courteous. And we have twenty minutes to chat before our guide, Ignacio Tognaccini Sainz, the project manager, is free to take us inside. This is a friendly ...”

“... credit crunch was: banks being too scared to lend to each other. In the very dry words of Mervyn King, the then governor of the Bank of England, Libor became ‘in many ways the rate at which banks do not lend to each other’. Euribor, the Eurozone version of Libor, is at the moment even worse, since in very many cases these banks would be more likely to ...”

“... on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities. Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America’s relations with the ...”

“... rest of it is a film set, cranking out heritage for export: crinoline frolics and The Madness of King George. I’d barely set foot outside my first secondhand bookshop when I was pounced on by a two-person television crew doing a vox pop on the Dome. There was a man hefting a DVC camera and a woman with a clipboard. After a morning trying to tease a story ...”

“... doomed to a swift, ignominious end, a 38-year-old economist from Birmingham University called Stephen Littlechild was working on ways to realise an esoteric idea that had been much discussed in radical Tory circles: privatisation. Privatisation was not a Thatcher patent. The Spanish economist Germà Bel traces the origins of the word to the German word ...”

“... for ‘uncle’ from those for ‘aunt’ you got almost the same answer as if you subtracted ‘king’ from ‘queen’, suggesting that this abstract, computer-derived space has a dimension that correlates with gender. One practical result of this work is an approach to machine translation that involves mapping between the feature representations of words ...”

“... to meet – leaders of governments-in-exile, naval commanders, bomber pilots, H.G. Wells, the boy-king of Yugoslavia – was made available. Churchill played host at a country-house weekend. The queen had her to tea at Buckingham Palace. Anthony Eden took her to the movies. Drawbell wasn’t satisfied. In the book he wrote about Thompson’s visit – Dorothy ...”

“... Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain with private characters who, if not invented, were surely concealed like the author himself under ...”

“... Ernest Goonetilleke, the first native governor-general, said. This was a point of pride. Don Stephen Senanayake, the country’s first prime minister, remarked: ‘There has been no rebellion in Ceylon, no non-cooperation movement and no fifth column. We were among the peoples who gave full collaboration while Britain was hard-pressed.’ After ...”

“... as Sankofa’s The Passion of Remembrance, Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs, even Stephen Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette, from a script by Hanif Kureishi. ‘Once you enter the politics of the end of the essential black subject, you are plunged headlong into the maelstrom of ‘a continuously contingent, unguaranteed political argument and ...”

“... most weekends and are unreported. The 17N group, responsible for the assassination of Brigadier Stephen Saunders, the British military attaché in Athens, in June 2000, had been rounded up, so it was claimed, just in time for the Olympics. Savas Xiros, the alleged motorbike gunman, was arrested after a lethal device he was carrying went off ...”

“... from the circumstances, public or private, that created them. Tennyson’s Idylls of the King drew inspiration from his sense of what the reading public of the time needed to hear. Now their art remains, but not that life which once gave it real meaning. In Russia, circumstances have not changed, and the uncompromisingly personal utterance of these ...”

“... Zero in 1972). Ten of the pieces these two books collect have already appeared in English in Stephen Heath’s valuable selection Image-Music-Text, and three are also to be found in Sontag’s anthology. An editor’s note to The Responsibility of Forms manages to miscount these previously translated items, and to turn Heath’s text into a test. It also ...”