“... Baath Party/Army/ Intelligence Service junta that has been in place since 1970. Only in a small corner of today’s Damascus, demarcated by the broad stone walls of the Old City, are ancient houses being restored and gentrified after generations of neglect. Syrians who for years avoided the dilapidated bazaars are revisiting the charm of mud and wood, stone ...”

“... aversion de principe, mais simplement la crainte de la contrepartie. ‘If he could stay in his corner … fear of the other side’. Is this a boxing metaphor? Beckett had been a good boxer in his youth. What exactly is feared here: the opponent, or being in the position of the opponent? What would it mean, following the English translation, to fear ‘the ...”

“... to London to live in the Chelsea home of her guardian, the former high commissioner to Delhi, Paul Gore-Booth. The next twenty years were marked by frustration and underachievement. She was burdened by a sense of mission, without any clear idea of what form it might take. Pasternak Slater remembers her as ‘serious, sad, uncertain where to go, all ...”

“... he talked mostly to him, but Princess Margaret didn’t confine herself to John Gielgud and Paul Eddington but to her credit wanted to meet the boys in the play, which she did, though I suspect most of them had no idea who she was. In 1984 Snowdon took pictures of me for (I think) the Sunday Times after the shooting of A Private Function, the most ...”

“... within six months … If I had known that Gordon believed that economic recovery lay around the corner – if he’d told me, his chancellor, this – then we could have had a discussion about it. The problem was that he clearly did not trust my advice, and now he appeared indifferent to what I thought … Systematic anonymous briefing from people you have ...”

“... to British Generals in Blair’s Wars, a collection of 26 essays mainly by retired generals, Sir Paul Newton uses this story to mock the cliché that the British armed forces ‘punch above their weight’. ‘This was like telling a lightweight boxer he can only hit his oncoming heavyweight opponent by punching sideways … The army embraced the manoeuvre ...”

“... in 1885, just as Longman’s started serialising his novel Prince Otto. He was ‘peddling in a corner’, he wrote to Edmund Gosse, ‘confined to the house, overwhelmed with necessary work, which I was not always doing well, and, in the very mild form in which the disease approaches me, touched with a sort of bustling cynicism’. He was still thinking ...”

“... of the Town and Country Planning Association told me. ‘They’ve been completely forced into a corner: you either hit the housing target or you don’t. If the government doesn’t offer any other way of meeting that challenge, what the hell do you do?’ Not that Boston’s local politicians feel trapped. They’re up for growth. Between 2018 and ...”

“... at Home in German Dugouts!’) I’ve got a whole shelf on war artists: C.R.W. Nevinson, Paul Nash, William Roberts, Wyndham Lewis, and the skullishly named Muirhead Bone. I’ve got books about Fabian Ware and the founding of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. I’ve a 1920 Blue Guide to Belgium and the Western Front and a Michelin Somme guide ...”

“... a matter either of the past or of the future: in any case not something you can walk round a windy corner and actually find. At the beginning, this did not worry me. Indeed, I was largely unaware, between 1939 and 1941 when I left for the Army, that I was following, or might rather earlier have been following, or with some necessary redirection might still ...”

“... diagram: ‘Now the shadow of the column – the column which supports the south-west corner of the roof – divides the corresponding corridor of the veranda into two equal parts.’ The prose seldom wavers from this sterile, descriptive rigour, yet its eerie rhythms and hypnotic repetitions – and its curious absence of affect – create a ...”

“... As the bombing of Barcelona continued, Tàpies remembered, ‘my father and me huddling in a corner of his office … as bombs fell … I can still hear with horror the piercing cries and see the smoke.’ With Franco’s troops moving towards Barcelona, Tàpies’s father went into hiding, afraid that the Catalan government ‘would require him to go ...”

“... open to the secretary of state were financial, and as punishment for the IRA’s theft of £26.5m, Paul Murphy announced on 10 March that Sinn Féin would be stripped of parliamentary allowances for Westminster worth £400,000. The next evening I drive to Moortown, a Republican area outside Cookstown, on the west side of Lough Neagh. There are pockets of ...”

“... gabled Victorian house. From the high window you could see half of the policeman’s helmet of St Paul’s dome, and further on, a glimpse of Parliament’s spires, and its loyal river selflessly flowing between its crowded banks. At dusk, holding a drink by the window and waiting for Jane to return home, I loved to see the city streetlights arrive in amber ...”

“... In November​ 2017, Marc Gabolde, an Egyptologist at Paul Valéry University in Montpellier, received a grainy photograph on his phone from a colleague attending the opening party for the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The picture showed a pink granite stele on display at the museum. Had Gabolde seen it before? If not, what did he think? The stele was dated to 1327 BCE and came from Abydos, a sacred city on the upper banks of the Nile ...”