“... Bournemouth following her mother’s death when she was about to turn fourteen. Roberts moved to London in the 1930s, where she met her future husband, the Welsh poet and editor Keidrych Rhys, at a Poetry London event. (Rhys had been christened William Ronald Rees Jones, but renamed himself after a river near his ...”

“... almost all the colonies, protectorates and overseas dependencies that had been under the Union Jack. The confluence between colonialism and immigration – the theme of Patel’s book – was initially a joining of two currents of displacement. The first was the torrent of British emigrants moving to the empire. A 1901 survey found that nearly three ...”

“... Brown Clark ran away from his bourgeois Glasgow home at thirteen, living in India, Australia and London before working as a surgeon in Edinburgh; by the 1880s, this ‘inveterate joiner of organisations’ had become dedicated to temperance, land reform and the independence of the Transvaal, and won election to Parliament as a Crofters’ MP for ...”

“... rare book collections served those with more specialised needs.New York couldn’t compete with London or Paris: it had no bouquinistes, no Farringdon Road, no British Library or Bibliothèque nationale de France. It lacked the quaint bookshops of Boston, where the staff seemed to know not only the books they sold but their 18th and 19th-century ...”

“... in lost export earnings, but this was trifling compared to the symbolic impact of a decision by Jack Welch, Chief Executive of the General Electric Corporation, to postpone a long-planned business trip. After all, US companies have invested more in India in the last two years than in all the previous forty. Addressing a meeting of financiers in ...”

“... few publications that directly developed or refined the notion of the 17th-century crisis. In 1991 Jack Goldstone’s Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World sought to subsume the idea into a far larger pattern of cyclical unrest and rebellion, whose most significant determinant was population expansion and its pressures. By the later 1990s it was ...”

“... Floor, the first novel in a multimillion-selling series with a notionally all-American hero, Jack Reacher. Reacher – no one in the books feels able to use his first name – hasn’t changed much since then. He’s got, if anything, more efficient and invulnerable, and he no longer passes dull moments by recalling blues recordings in high fidelity. In ...”

“... North. ‘Here are some things Charlie said were in short supply.’ The girl (Sissy Spacek) fixes Jack Lemmon with a pitying look. ‘Not any more,’ she says. The scarcities, like everything else, were politically conditioned.In one way, this strangulation of Chilean democracy was a jewel in the crown of those successful Washington-inspired military coups ...”

“... it was part of a Roman burial ground, an unclean extremity lying beyond the walls of the City of London. In 1603, a quarter of a century after bricks began to be manufactured here, John Stow described its buildings as ‘filthy cottages’. Since then, the area, whether one calls it Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Tower Hamlets, Banglatown, has been a byword for ...”

“... Wanstead and New Hall in Essex, Burley-on-the-Hill, Wallingford House and Chelsea House in London, as well as York House on the Strand, which he bought from Bacon. Buckingham renovated his homes at great expense and shared them with his wife, the heiress Lady Katherine Manners, daughter of the earl of Rutland. They had four children, three of whom ...”

“... on the bus too, and the man at the wheel was Neal Cassady, the legendary long-distance driver of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Stone was part of the Perry Lane crowd, but when the hijinks began to eat into his writing time he slipped away. Kesey’s voyage east with the Merry Pranksters was one of the signature moments of the decade, along with Altamont and ...”

“... Much to my surprise, Althusser got in touch with me and suggested that he should come to London and speak to my seminar. This he did. In the course of the seminar, he was asked why it was that he had not attacked the leadership of the Party in such an open and direct way before. Why had he not spoken out earlier (a reproach which Elleinstein was also ...”

“... Macleod distinguished himself by avoiding his colleagues’ ponderous circumlocutions. ‘Look, Jack,’ he said, ‘the basic question is: “Did you fuck her?” ’ Sadly, Profumo continued to try to lie his way out with mealy-mouthed statements about there being ‘no impropriety’. Wondrously, the Tory elders accepted this. Perhaps they thought ...”

“... chanting of verse. Foster has much quiet fun with the psalteries, and for good measure reproduces Jack Yeats’s satirical drawing of his brother explaining ‘speaking to the psaltery’ to an audience in the American Wild West. Nobody seemed to like what Shaw called the ‘nerve-destroying crooning’ this practice entailed, except of course the poet, who ...”

“... on the phone, Karel Reisz and his wife, Betsy Blair, were always at the centre of talk. The London Review decided to orchestrate a tribute to this most elegant and spirited of men, and immediately there was only one way to make it work – by getting the people who knew him talking. Andrew O’Hagan Michael Wood (film critic): Those working-class lads ...”