“... of jobs to the area. Three thousand, according to some reports. Eight thousand, according to the more imaginative. Announcing in 2022 that the government was financially supporting the project (in fact, it never did), Boris Johnson and his ministers managed to include every trope of British industrial boosterism in a single press release. The new plant was ...”

“... Lizzie Hardwick’s letters. That seemed to me too much.Those unstoppable sonnets.I’m thinking more of the letters Lizzie wrote to him, which he then turned into more sonnets and then said I’m sorry about this at the end.Do you see any kind of road not taken for you in the way Lowell went about things? In all those ...”

“... how, from their first meeting at the Caprice, he had been mesmerised by Ashley. She was so much more than he could ‘ever hope to be’: ‘The reality … far outstripped any fantasy for myself. I could never have contemplated it for myself.’* It took a while for Ashley, along with her medical and legal advisers, to realise what Corbett was up to (nine ...”

“... countryside or travel through it and see someone at work in a field; the occasional tractor, no more. But the work gets done. The chequered pattern changes colour and texture, season by season. It’s surprising that we treat this epic, continual, land-defining endeavour as if it were both inevitable and eternal. The colliery tunnels have fallen in, the ...”

“... case of Assange. But there is something else about the genre, a sense that the world might be more ghosted now than at any time in history. Isn’t Wikipedia entirely ghosted? Isn’t half of Facebook? Isn’t the World Wide Web a new ether, in which we are all haunted by ghostwriters? I had written about missing persons and celebrity, about secrecy and ...”

“... or November when the League of Nations gets into working order at Geneva, though Sean T. is more optimistic on the ground that Wilson can’t go home in May without having secured something definite for us.’ Ten days later Duffy’s optimism had vanished: ‘Now expect Peace Congress which big four control will do nothing [for Ireland] if English ...”

“... he was known to be astute and an implacable adversary.He had been on the throne a little more than two years when Moumen Diouri, a revolutionary firebrand in his mid-twenties, was arrested. Diouri was the son of a staunch anti-colonialist who had been imprisoned under the French protectorate in Morocco. In the run-up to Algerian independence in ...”

“... Sunday Inquiry, which has already lasted two years and cost a reported £50 million – with two more years ahead, it seems likely to top the £80 million poured into the DeLorean sports car fiasco. To what end? Violence routinely erupted in inner Belfast during our visit, and the Loyalist (meaning Protestant, in the tribal sense) paramilitary boss Mark ...”

“... martyrs and the poor people of Cuba. Let’s face it once and for all: it is true that there were more houses of ill repute than publishing houses in Havana before the Revolution – or more properly, Fidel Castro – seized power in 1959. But you can say the same of New York now, where, on a stroll down Broadway, you’ll ...”

“... and also, among the twinkling lights out there, you could find the uncelebrated birthplace of Thomas Wolfe, the North Carolinian who wrote Look Homeward, Angel. As the truck got nearer the Waffle House, someone on the radio made the point that North Carolina was itself no stranger to hurricanes – Hazel (1954), Hugo (1989), Fran (1996), Floyd ...”

“... populist, Eurosceptic Law and Justice Party to rule a booming country that has benefited from more than €130 billion in EU investment in its roads, railways and schools, a country where only a few years after EU accession in 2004 hundreds of foreign factories and distribution centres opened, employing hundreds of thousands of people, a country whose ...”

“... called Be Good to Yourself,’ she said, ‘with fresh, healthy fillings, and here we have the more gourmet range, Taste the Difference. We have a policy of using British produce where we can. With carrots, for example, we want to provide economic profitability to the farmer, using the short carrots for one line of produce and the bigger ones for ...”

“... his colleague said. Wright was soon 30,000 feet above the Tasman Sea watching the programmer Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) being chased by unknowable agents in The Matrix. Wright found the storyline strangely comforting; it was good to know he wasn’t alone. At Auckland Airport, Wright kept his phone on flight mode, but turned it on to use the ...”

“... Hassan, and their two daughters. Hassan used to work at the mosque. Later on, when he was spending more time away, Rania would send him loving messages along with videos of the girls. One of them showed Fethia wading through a pool of water in a blue dress. Another was of Hania, aged two, rolling down a hill of daisies by Ladbroke Grove.In the 15th ...”