“... to ways of dealing with Britain’s rubbish. ‘Everything is checked,’ she says. Her colleague Peter Robinson chips in. ‘The whole area of waste handling and management is so much more technically sound in the UK than it ever was before.’ He smiles. ‘This country’s history of landfill has actually been quite safe; it has served us well.’ On the ...”

“... extra heads. I’ll exhibit it. It will keep us in luxury.‘I’m on the pill,’ I said. An urge rose in me, to say: we are sexually very keen so I take three a day, do you think that’s enough? But then a stronger urge rose in me, to be sick on his shoes.I can see him, now that the years have flown; his crinkly fairish ...”

“... of productivity growth, opened up the potential for far higher profits. The stock market rose to extraordinary heights in anticipation of these profits. Financiers, the story goes, naturally responded to these firms’ elevated share prices by lending them money, or buying their shares. Rising investment enabled the accelerated introduction of new ...”

“... volumes of the History to supply us with details and appropriate qualifications. In the meantime Peter Slee, in a trim and readable book, offers us his views on the place of history teaching in undergraduate liberal education at Oxford and Cambridge and in the new Late Victorian university college at Manchester. His concern is principally with what was ...”

“... brilliant lawyer; a young man with no education, born in Wales in 1938 who went to sea at 17 and rose through the seamen’s union, via Ruskin College, to become an MP; a shammes’s son from a one-room flat in the East End, born in 1944, who trained as an accountant and then made a fortune after drifting into show business by starting a record label. Those ...”

“... scandalous … He has made a will leaving them to me plus £500.’ In the end they were left to Peter Coats, Channon’s boyfriend of many years, who allowed the publication in 1967 of a drastically abbreviated and expurgated edition, incompetently edited by Robert Rhodes James, which was greeted with widespread ridicule and contemptuous comparison with ...”

“... the strain. Is there enough inherent strength in ‘the sinews of the Russian state’, to use Peter Reddaway’s phrase, to sustain the free and democratic political life which its leaders advocate, and of which there are some signs? The answers Richard Sakwa and Alexander Yakovlev give to these questions are discouraging, even where they are not meant to ...”

“... knowledgeable not only about their literature but their other arts and broader culture. Bunting rose through the ranks swiftly: flying officer, flight lieutenant, squadron-leader, retaining that rank until 1954. As early as 1941 he was recommended for a commissioned rank in the Intelligence Branch. It is unclear just how much authority Bunting ultimately ...”

“... careers of pupils, who included Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, George Orwell, Cyril Connolly, Peter Fleming, John Bayley – a literary macédoine to which several other ingredients could be added. As it fell out, I had myself no dealings with Lyttelton at school, knowing him only by sight. He had the air of being young for his age, a tall, apparently ...”

“... book draws to a close. Its title is accurate as to its content and style: ‘Diana. “You was a Rose in a Garden of Weeds.” ’ The impetuosity which explains the existence of the first part of the book damages the second, which is called ‘Voicing the Constitution’. Here Barnett sets out to ‘outline a case for reform’, opening with ‘a lengthy ...”

“... somehow lurking in Howards End or the haunted garden of Kipling’s ‘They’ or the Neverland of Peter Pan. De la Mare inhabited that wistfulness not only because he was poetically averse to embracing modernity, but because it suited his technical gifts, and because his exquisite attention to detail and rhythm allowed him to invest wistfulness itself with a ...”

“... uncompromising and deeply protective. She shied away from the lens, her most recent biographer, Peter Kurth, explains, because ‘she could make no natural motion while posing for the camera.’ Natural motion – as opposed to the engraved arcs and acrobatic tricks of classical ballet, the swooning decadence of the waltz or the silliness of social dancing ...”

“... well. While some increase in luxury was an inevitable concomitant of commercial progress, Dr Peter Kürn wrote in 1792, when the sum of sensual pleasures surpasses the sum of more noble and more useful pursuits, when natural needs can no longer be distinguished from the crowd of imagined and fantastic ones, when reason does not choose, but only ...”

“... trials, half of which resulted in convictions, except during witch panics, when the rate usually rose. Not all communities bothered with the law. In 1705 in the fishing village of Pittenweem in Fife a mob set about Janet Cornfoot, who they believed had cast spells on the community. They dragged her to the harbour, hung her by the ankles, pelted her with ...”

“... that no one would suspect that the pope had left the building. At the church of SS Marcellin and Peter, the pope’s coach was met by the Bavarian ambassador, Count Karl von Spaur, who was clutching a pistol in his right hand, in case they were challenged. The fugitive was bustled into a small open carriage and driven out of the city, his face obscured by ...”