“... was an insight that could occur only to someone thoroughly marinated in academic ways of thinking. John Battelle, an internet-world insider and search-engine specialist, gives a fascinating account of it in his indispensable book The Search. Page was fooling around at Stanford, trying to come up with an idea for his PhD thesis. He had always been interested in ...”

“... customers at our butcher’s shop. Like Professor Needham, Mrs Kettle denounced the invasion of North Korea by the Americans and their use of germ warfare, not a view I’d then seen put forward. I was at the meeting not because of any left-wing views, but because the war was of some personal interest to me, as in 1952 I was due to be conscripted and likely ...”

“... at least according to Irish development agencies – is like everywhere else in Europe and North America, only better. In 1980 the news magazine Magill published a report on Irish poverty which stated that just under a million people (out of a population of 3.2 million) were living below the poverty line. Unemployment and emigration soared in the ...”

“... the writer was black and, as the title page claimed, ‘A Fugitive Slave Recently Escaped from North Carolina’? You may wonder why anyone would bother to fake such an identity, but who would have imagined that anyone would dare fake the memoirs of a Holocaust survivor? Yet it seems to have happened. More to the point in this instance is the embarrassing ...”

“... mid-Sixties we began to make a swap in the evening and thus became acquainted with the writing of John Healy in the Backbencher column of that newspaper. He wrote every week about a new breed of Fianna Fail politician. He wrote with wit and irreverence, but he wrote from the inside and he conferred a huge glamour on the young ministers in Lemass’s ...”

“... States and Britain’s military chiefs, who took seriously Iceland’s threats to opt out of the North Atlantic surveillance chain monitoring the Soviet nuclear submarine fleet, London effectively surrendered the two hundred mile zone to Reykjavik. Cruelly, the man obliged to seal the deal was the Labour MP for Grimsby, the then foreign secretary, Anthony ...”

“... Three years after Franklin returned to America, Parliament extended the Stamp Act to the North American colonies, placing a duty on newspapers, legal documents and even playing cards in order to force all the Americans to bear a share of their own defence. So now ‘the people’, not just the proprietors, were being taxed – and by an authority a ...”

“... that has no counterpart abroad. He lingered on – still does – though the rambling houses of North Oxford built to accommodate the new families of married fellows stand as monuments to the social changes that inaugurated his decline. His love objects were not usually girls, though John Betjeman, sighing over ...”

“... The district​ of Blackfriars, a squeeze of old streets between Ludgate Hill and the north bank of the Thames, takes its name from the Dominican monastery built there in the 13th century. The Dominicans were known from the colour of their capes as ‘black friars’, as distinct from Franciscan ‘grey friars’ and Carmelite ‘white friars ...”

“... legacy of 19th-century scholars determined to claim the heritage of Roman antiquity for (North-) Western Europe, dispossessing its rightful heirs and smearing them, perversely, with tropes of Oriental despotism invented by the Greeks of the classical age. Save in the book’s subtitle, a commercial concession, Kaldellis restricts the offending word ...”

“... From 1940 the poor black sharecroppers of the Southern United States began to go north in large numbers. The movement seemed to resemble the great emigrations that had created America in the first place. Anxious to escape deteriorating conditions at home, the migrants were also attracted by opportunities far away ...”

“... independent secular Kurdish state is part of a pattern that has emerged in the Middle East and North Africa over the last 25 years. The history of the KRG is simply a recent and dramatic example. Secular nationalism is an ebbing force. Countries like Egypt, which gained independence sixty years ago when Nasser survived British, French and Israeli attack ...”

“... That John Updike has a Trollopian fidelity to his characters is evident from the four books of the Rabbit series; this new book is the third of a sequence about the New York Jewish novelist Henry Bech. As it carries him into his seventies it may be that this is the last of Bech, as Rabbit at Rest was presumably the last of Rabbit, but as long as the real author is alive, fertile and motile, one cannot be sure ...”

“... comfort of snow and ice, in eloquent emptiness, however much Larkin professed to hope that ‘the north ship will come back instead of being bogged up there in a glacier.’ What you desire is not yourself, because your self is still haplessly if hopelessly alive and ongoing, but the absence which mysteriously becomes sex itself, preserved in Katherine who is ...”

“... midland counties of England’ with ‘the pine trees and vices of the south’. (Not of the north, interestingly enough. Gothicism never took root in the Scottish background which Sir Walter had made his own, and where even barbarous old custom was healthy and bracing as well as picturesque.) Yet like the Magic Realists Angela Carter used the genre to ...”