“... in the British Antarctic Survey: they were expected to drink beer in the hall, while the officer class took cocktails in the drawing-room. The men preferred beer, we were told, and, given the choice, they might well have chosen ‘cloudy’, the connoisseur’s drop, before the filtered blandness of the more expensive ‘bright’ ale; a cask of cloudy ...”

“... and is known for his promiscuity, notwithstanding the celebrated prison letters to his working-class wife Olga. (When he was released from jail in 1977, he spent his first weeks of freedom with a mistress.) In the Eighties, he was ruthless in establishing himself as Czechoslovakia’s most important dissident – when a potential rival emerged, doubtful ...”

“... the torch at midnight. The most celebrated (and photographed) visitors to I Tatti in the post-war period included such marginal representatives of the Civilised Life as Harry S. Truman, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy (whose presence was, BB felt, ‘life-enhancing’), and, most improbable of all, Ernest Hemingway. Meryle Secrest discloses that Hemingway was ...”

“... to its traditional inhabitants. As a result, the carbon offset market has created a whole new class of ‘green’ human rights abuses, with farmers and Indigenous people being physically attacked by park rangers or private security when they try to access these lands. Said’s comment about tree-huggers should be seen in this context. And there is ...”

“... history of the world had four and a half decades without pandemic, countrywide disaster or world war, accompanied by unprecedented growth in corporate profits, and yet ordinary people’s pay remained the same. I think people would react with amazement and want to know why. Things have been getting consistently better for the ordinary worker, they would ...”

“... the officers, the servants and an occasional emigrant or foremast hand. He pays great attention to class, finding most of the passengers and officers rather common, the exceptions being Miss Granham, a governess in her thirties whose father had been a canon; Mr Prettiman, a social philosopher, something like Shelley in background and political opinions but ...”

“... to Paris, the involvement in the Resistance, the work for the Irish Red Cross at the end of the war, the partnership with Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, the struggle to become a writer, and, of course, the attainment of ‘fame’. Cronin writes with considerable charm, though he also has a taste for blarney and cannot resist the irritating familiarity of ...”

“... could afford such an expenditure (it represented the entire weekly income of many working-class families), but sales to individuals were not the chief support of the system. That came from the bulk purchases of the circulating libraries, above all Mudie’s and to a lesser extent W.H. Smith’s, whose loan stock was tripled by the three-volume ...”

“... like the plague they are’). The necessary result of all this, Rodger said, was his ‘War on Women’, in the course of which he would ‘punish all females’ for the crime of depriving him of sex. He would target the Alpha Phi sorority, ‘the hottest sorority of UCSB’, because it contained ‘the very girls who represent everything I hate in ...”

“... of him. Although he had become famous for capturing the mood of a generation – left-wing, class-conscious – he couldn’t rest easy in the generation of a single mood. ‘Poetry is the clear expression of mixed feelings,’ he observed in a note to The Double Man (1941), and such feelings come to the fore when he’s on the move. ‘In Memory of ...”

“... of a prison. The polluted acres of the Imperial Gas Light and Coke Company were re-created, after war and bomb damage, as Haggerston Park. The man in the black coat, barely pausing to steady himself, dives into the spasmodic traffic; motorists unable to believe their luck that the lights are working and the permanent utility trenches have migrated a couple of ...”

“... a redeemed sinner loves virtue. Because of the rush to industrialise and then to recover from the war, Japan’s cities were once among the most polluted on earth. But the Japanese took the oil shocks and energy price rises of the 1970s as personal challenges for the belt-tightening at which they excel. Japan is now the world’s second industrial ...”

“... widely regarded as the greatest single achievement of the European Union since the end of the Cold War, and occasion for more or less unqualified self-congratulation, has left one inconspicuous thorn in the palm of Brussels. The furthest east of all the EU’s new acquisitions, even if the most prosperous and democratic, has been a tribulation to its ...”

“... taking place as we speak, with unaccustomed speed. (Little besides a giant asteroid or a nuclear war could alter the surface of the earth faster and more completely.) Second, the Anthropocene gathers all disparate environmental issues under a single heading, from global warming down to the emissions of a trash incinerator in a poor neighbourhood of ...”

“... to which we are all so deeply mortgaged. Haggerston Park, E2, a modest enclosure replacing war-damaged terraces and the demolished Imperial Gas, Light and Coke Company, has long been an oasis. It was opened as a public park in 1958. Its scandals are old scandals and have no bearing on the current frenzy for makeovers, peppery paths, wooden obstacles ...”