“... Hania (right) On Monday, 12 June, Rania and Naseem went to the Sainsbury’s by the canal at the north end of Ladbroke Grove. They went from there to the Westway Centre off Portobello Road; that was where Rania took English classes (she had the best attendance) and she was due to graduate that day so they went there and met up with their friend Muna ...”

“... A wood engraving​ by the illustrator Joan Hassall, who died in 1988, shows Elizabeth Gaskell arriving at the Brontë parsonage. Patrick Brontë is taking Gaskell’s hand; Charlotte stands between them, arms open in a gesture of introduction. We – the spectators, whose gaze Charlotte seems to acknowledge (or is she looking at her father apprehensively?) – stand in the doorway; the participants are framed in the hallway arch, with the curved wooden staircase behind them ...”

“... lost his childhood.Before leaving for Palestine, Joe took a flat at Regent House, Zamalek, just north of the Gezira Club. This was the most popular residential area for the Inglizi (two nearby blocks of flats were known as Elephant and Castle), so rents were high and, since their Egyptian owners tended to remove most of the furniture and rugs, the flats ...”

“... Britain established Home Rule states – one substantive, comprising the six Unionist-majority north-eastern counties, and one notional, made up of the 26 remaining counties which had Nationalist majorities. Following de Valera’s return at the end of 1920, and various peace feelers, a truce was called from 11 July 1921 and, after preliminary discussions ...”

“... For one thing, new glasshouses would have to be on or near the same latitude (approx 51 degrees north), as they are in Holland, to make the most of natural light. For another, buyers for the big UK supermarket chains can squeeze a mega-grower like Thanet Earth as hard as any other producer. A larger query hanging over hydroponic growing in the UK is quite ...”

“... novelists: Kingsley Amis and Georges Simenon. When Amis’s second wife and fellow novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard, saw him, at eleven o’clock on the morning he was due to lunch at Buckingham Palace, standing in the garden punishing an enormous whisky, she said, ‘Bunny, do you have to have a drink?’ He replied (and it was a reply that would have ...”

“... for a start, the same Ayatollah as the one who had gone pimping with Ronald Reagan and Oliver North in order to arm the colonial mercenaries in Nicaragua who had been so eloquently opposed by Salman Rushdie in The Jaguar Smile? Or was it the other Ayatollah, the genial friend of Kurdistan? The ally of the women of Persia? Who but an effete Westerner would ...”

“... a shot? One of the more outrageous selling points is a promised ‘clear day’ vision of the North Sea fishing fleet 44 miles downriver from this pyramid lighthouse. In promotional photographs some of the private baths on the upper decks look competition-sized. Wet rooms are like clearings in a tropical forest. There are marble foot basins in which ...”

“... of American writing in the 1940s, Agee was a Southerner, from Knoxville, Tennessee, who came North, stayed and prospered. The story that these details suggest, of exile and nostalgia, is more pertinent than the data of Agee’s education, employment, marriages. He enjoyed wide recognition and often enough he finished his projects. Yet the things he ...”

“... House, Sydney already had what Australians hoped was a world-famous Bridge, endlessly repainted in North Sea grey, brooding like a Calvinist’s conscience over the city that started off as King George’s Gulag and still struggles to shake off the mighty influence of a minor archipelago on the other side of the world. A glance tells you more than you want to ...”

“... surveyed by drones, or hard-hat visionaries in helicopters, from heights where even the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park looks great, is only there to be explained, improved, colonised and captured. So? So? So what?So when I think I’m moving across a city of memories, where I have lived and worked for fifty years, I find that, very soon, I lose the markers ...”

“... metropolitan area and on the south coast.Every time I take the long escalator down to the Elizabeth Line, or contemplate the implications of our compulsive burrowing into the radiant future promised by developers, I wonder about the psychic damage being inflicted on London as a living organism. ‘Intercept, store and ultimately transfer’ is the ...”

“... the river the railway and the road. It’s the first proper country that you get to as you come north out of Leeds and going home on the train I pass the place quite often. Only these days I look. I’ve been passing the place for years without looking because I didn’t know it was a place; that anything had happened there to make it a place, let alone a ...”

“... you on the highways and byways. He is the sorest evil this country has to strive with.’ Or Elizabeth Smith, the Scottish-born wife of a Wicklow landlord: ‘The Irish landlord is in no essential different from the Irish peasant – his superior position has raised him in many points above his labouring countryman but the character of this race is ...”

“... blasts and a recording delivers XR’s apocalyptic version of the shipping forecast: ‘Viking, North Utsire, severe gales, summer heatwaves … moderate or poor, becoming desperate soon.’Trafalgar Square, 7 October 10.30 p.m. A heavy downpour has let up. A young activist – an economist who works in a government department he asks me not to name – is ...”