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“... mime of activity, its sirens and flashing lights, was organised like the final, formulaic act of a James Bond movie. Another mad scheme for world domination revealed. Another doomsday weapon defused. Bond movies, up to now, were way beyond North Greenwich’s ambitions. The old gasworks had featured in the odd episode of Dr Who and even, curiously, as the set ...”

“... and remembering some of the books they read then. There’s Camus and Sartre, Colin Wilson and Lawrence Durrell – not quite the literary equivalent of flares but inducing something of the same incredulity: ‘Did we really read/ wear these?’ I miss the atlas I really wanted and come away with one or two biographies, including a memoir of David Winn, an ...”

“... Although Faith Healer did not win critical acclaim when it was first performed in New York with James Mason as Frank Hardy, a later production in Dublin with Donal McCann in the part made clear that Friel had created one of the most subtle and memorable male characters in Irish writing. But it was his play Translations, first performed in 1980, which seems ...”

“... like America. The most conspicuous instance was Eliot’s hero (and Boston’s own) Henry James, followed by Pound himself, Gertrude Stein, and just recently, that robustly American figure Robert Frost who, with his wife and children, had in 1913 taken up residence outside London, and from there, with Pound’s assistance and to considerable public ...”

“... one. Had Her Majesty gone for another duff read, an early George Eliot, say, or a late Henry James, novice reader that she was she might have been put off reading for good and there would be no story to tell. Books, she would have thought, were work. As it was, with this one she soon became engrossed and, passing her bedroom that night clutching his ...”

“... to be fitted lifeboats, the fizz of welding torches, the juddering of rivet guns. The shipyard of James Lamont and Co. bordered the castle on its upriver side. Downriver, and even closer, lay the Ferguson Brothers yard. The ships built at both yards were small – 300 feet long at most – and had humdrum purposes: ferries, tugs, minesweepers, dredgers, the ...”

“... landscapes no longer exist, and many of the hunted populations are now gone or nearly so. John James Audubon, not yet a portraitist of dead birds but a thriving con artist, had hoped to ‘see the surplus population of Europe coming to assist in the destruction of the forest’. It was beginning to happen. In Louisville, where they would settle and where ...”

“... an earlier generation. This renewal of the old revolutionary imperative combined memories of Lawrence of Arabia with the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance. From Havana to Managua, via Algiers, Dares-Salaam, Santiago and Hanoi, what seemed like an entire generation in Europe lost itself in the excitement of small revolutionary ...”

“... so publicly, and most of those who did – including Senator Ernest Hollings and Representative James Moran – were condemned for raising the issue. Michael Kinsley wrote in late 2002 that ‘the lack of public discussion about the role of Israel … is the proverbial elephant in the room.’ The reason for the reluctance to talk about it, he observed, was ...”