“... Tangier Assignment. A toothbrush. A book titled Psycho-Cybernetics. An inhaler. A hand mirror. Black shoe polish. Someone reading this piece might say: ‘So? A list of personal effects? What’s the big deal?’ Well, it’s the limits, and the pathos. It might be budget astronaut equipment. The apprehensive emphasis on personal care. Is it vanity or ...”

“... literature on contemporary attitudes towards animals generally, and towards pets in particular. Black Beauty is mentioned in passing, but nowhere do we hear about the Romanticism that may have helped shape the strong and affectionate feelings that Germans even now hold for animals and nature; nor do we meet Eliot’s cats or Kipling’s rich ...”

“... suicide of his wife, which apparently was the result of an affair he had been conducting. In 1993, Michael Mates left the government after disclosures that he had sent gifts and messages of support to the businessman Asil Nadir. Norman Lamont caused an uproar over his use of public money to evict a tenant from his property. Other lesser Tories, such as Mrs ...”

“... land of transplanted urban dream kingdoms, a paradise for poets who do not wish to be disturbed. Michael Viney’s documentary, The Corner of the Eye, opens with a slow sweep across this landscape, a picture of distances fringed with purple and a few tawny cows nosing through the foreground, then switches to a little white cottage in the midst of it all, and ...”

“... be a hard and very bloody fight. We must expect heavy losses.’ Britain’s practitioners of the black arts, a cast of Ealing comedy characters whom Macintyre describes with affection, set out to reduce those losses by convincing Germany that preparations for a Sicilian invasion were a mere distraction from the invasion of Greece. Greece was ostensibly a ...”

“... we’re trying to do is to write cricket bats.’ If Tom Frayn had had his way, his son, Michael, would have joined this company of enthusiasts or, better still, have opened the batting for England at the Oval. Many hours were spent on back-garden coaching but the boy proved a serious disappointment. Looking back, seven decades later, he blames the ...”

“... and the shore, I find a deep pool in the grey, silty, slightly sulphurous sand – this is the Black Strand. I remember from childhood how hill folk used to come to Narin’s great sweeping strand and stand all day at the head of the strand in a sulphur spring, their dark trousers rolled up or frocks tucked into their knickers. The ‘saltwaterers’, they ...”

“... Farson, in The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (also 1993), gives it a passing reference. Michael Peppiatt, in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (2008), gives the year of Bacon’s departure for the cottage as 1942, adding: ‘The enforced idleness, free of wartime anxieties and the distractions of London, served as a catalyst to his real ...”

“... In the days​ before artists brought colour to the cover, the London Review of Books was black and white. Of course, originally, it had no front at all: the first edition, in 1979, was meekly folded into the New York Review of Books. The following year it jumped out of that pouch and into a world where literary journals were routinely typographical ...”

“... she did, over and over, till she spat like a veteran. Someone else taught her how to smoke. From Michael Jackson she learned how to grab her crotch. Are these not accomplishments, hard-won for a girl from a nice family? So often Andersen seems to miss the point. He will, persistently, describe Madonna as a transcendent beauty, when, as everyone can ...”

“... only the English edition that it fails to give the pagination of the German one. When Geach and Black’s volume of translations first came out in 1952, there existed hardly anything of Frege’s in English save his Foundations of Arithmetic. Moreover, even for readers of German, his other books were almost inaccessible, and his articles available only in ...”

“... fantasy of racial degeneration. Luckily the hearties don’t have it all their own way. Michael Crick’s and David Smith’s book describes how, at the same time as Stan Cullis was assembling his Wolves team, Matt Busby at Manchester United was embarking on a managerial career uniquely committed to attractive attacking football. The triumph’n ...”

“... precise about the needs and wants that draw the fugitive and lonely together – a white girl and black boy in ‘Black Boy’, an overlooked wife and an inventive, operatic Baron in ‘Friend of the Family’. ‘Keep your pity,’ warns the title of a grotesque story of misplaced charity towards a vicious elderly ...”

“... Nead. ‘People recall these years through veils of mist and shades of grey, conjuring images of black and white photography or newsreel.’ Do they? People, I suspect, have been so often told that this was the palette attached to that decade and a half that they unquestioningly accept it. It is an old chromatic cliché. Edward VI’s coat of arms is twice ...”

“... went to a London bookshop looking for a copy of Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). When she asked the shop assistant for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people racialised as ...”