“... island, he went with his son to a beauty spot with a famous lake, hired a boat, and caught a five-foot-long fish – this, he concluded, was a ‘good omen’ for the future (the word for ‘fish’ in Chinese is a homophone for the word meaning ‘abundance’). Chiang had squandered the abundance he once enjoyed on the mainland: half of his ...”

“... the spur of the moment and expecting his lover to abandon ‘dustpan and brush and be taken at the foot of the stairs’. She trades him in for the manager of the local Stud, a colonel who charms his mares as if they were women and whom Ursula Wyndham finds both ‘dull’ and ‘magnetic’. The colonel has a chilly wife, a long list of past loves that he ...”

“... should ‘decide when would be the proper time to drop one’. According to Ann and John Tusa, Winston Churchill, then out of office, ‘went on a solitary rampage, growling that the Russians must be told to retreat from Berlin or “we will raze their cities.” ’ Perhaps he had only old-fashioned razing in mind. (Lord Boothby has put it on ...”

“... past its entrance to the nearest bus stop, preferring to leap from the moving vehicle at the foot of the Gallery steps. Up to the age of 95 he remained a tireless walker, maintaining correctly that there was no law of trespass in the English judicial system, and always furnished with the prescriptive sixpence to tender to some indignant landed proprietor ...”

“... we were reminded of what we had known and then forgotten: that it was the birthplace of Cecil John Rhodes. Moreover, we were told that the house in which Rhodes was born had been turned into a museum. Since my wife had been born in Rhodesia, and I had grown up in Kimberley, we felt we had no choice in the matter: we had to go and visit it. To grow up in ...”

“... to hated courtiers, who would then promptly ruin themselves on its costly maintenance.) Yet John Goode notes in Women Writing that Lawrence is here unwittingly acute about something central to sexist ideology: that ‘woman is an image to be uttered’ – uttered, that is, by other people. One feature of these four books allows them to be discussed ...”

“... as the Hundred Days Offensive: 122,000 were injured; 26,000 were killed. The monument is a 180-foot-high Doric pillar made of granite; the figure of Liberty stands at the top, with its right arm raised. Before the tower are four flights of steps made of white stone which lead up to the column’s entrance. Walls to the left and right name the smaller ...”

“... Grave’. It leads to a blunt stone plinth with a round boulder on top and a plaque commemorating John Flynn (1880-1951), a Presbyterian minister who was sent by his church to the Northern Territory in 1912 to investigate conditions in the bush. His report was grim, describing poor communications and scant healthcare. In 1928, with the pedal-powered radio ...”

“... save Venice, by protecting it from pollution and installing a new sewage system. Simultaneously, John Sparrow was also turning his attention to the plight of the stricken city. In one of his major letters to the Times, the then Warden of All Souls addressed the urgent question of Venetian dogshit. He noted with regret the inadequacy of the local decree which ...”

“... don’t see much more than roofs. To reach the front gates you take paths that angle up the ten-foot clay bank that was cut when the road was made. The land seems less stable than the timber-framed houses that sit like ships on a sea of clay and rotten rock that after a week of rain slides below them in slow motion. In the old days, after several wet weeks ...”

“... The chief pleasure of the new version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is the sight of John Travolta as the model bad guy. He is genial and livid by turns, entirely persuasive in both moods, the very image of crazed behaviour, and far more engaging and unhinged than he was in Pulp Fiction. That film brought certain of his earlier roles to mind, but this one makes us want to rethink Grease entirely, and maybe the whole genre of the musical ...”

“... Group each took home more than $6 million in 2008; the founder of the University of Phoenix, John Sperling, is a billionaire. By the time students realise that they’ve made a terrible mistake, there is often no way for them to back out and no one to help on the other end of the phone; there’s nothing for it but to press ahead and try to recoup some ...”

“... One can see that the ass has already entered the stream – the torchlight catches a ripple by its foot. On the far left, light from a fire two herdsmen have made carves a foliage-lined hollow out of the night, gilding at its edges the heads and flanks of animals and the surface of the stream. The only strong colour is Joseph’s red coat; the rest is ...”

“... and their own duties seemed looser than in the ward below. But it was the presence of Roger and John, the two residents mentioned above, which accounted for most of the noise and disorder in the room itself. They also introduced a kind of comedy that was quite inseparable from the pathos of the position they were in. Roger, as I shall call him, a man in his ...”