“... seashells, and having in childhood found the lurid polystyrene enclosures occupied every Advent by Father Christmases in the local department stores more sinister than alluring, I came only belatedly to an interest in grottoes. So too, it seems, did Shakespeare, who never used the word ‘grotto’, not even after the arrival of the French hydraulic ...”

“... different from, and even superior to, that of Europeans or white people. This view was mocked by some African artists, intellectuals and political rivals. ‘A tiger doesn’t proclaim his tigritude,’ Wole Soyinka said. ‘He pounces.’ But négritude was the animating spirit of Fesman, which was a huge success.Senghor took power in 1960 on Senegal’s ...”

“... claim a longer lifespan. The Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, signed into existence by 23 states in Rio in 1947, also predates Nato, though it isn’t celebrated in anything like the same way – perhaps because the US has a record of attacking the other signatories. The claim that Nato is unique among international alliances in duration and ...”

“... plays in which ‘everybody talks in similes’; and Westerns in which gold was ‘sure to be discovered at five minutes to eleven’.Topical themes promised ‘novelty’ but that dwindled in the inevitable ‘follow-ups’. Parker noted a bevy of plays dealing with Prohibition, the ‘Irish question’ (‘what a rough day it will ...”

“... in a ‘cold, damp three-star hotel’ in Liverpool, worried that if he went outside he’d be attacked. He had embarked on what he called ‘Operation Scouse-grovel’, after the magazine he edited, the Spectator, published an (unsigned) editorial describing Liverpudlians as having ‘a peculiar, and deeply unattractive, psyche’: ‘They see ...”

“... write this Life, and in fact the man himself noted before his death in 2016 that if there had to be a biography, Sisman would be the right person to do it. The result is an elaborately detailed and affectionate account that leaves a slight whiff of constraint. It’s as if Sisman had more to say about ‘Asa’, as a ...”

“... College. Here you could shop for Panton, Knoll or Eames chairs, World Expo posters or fabrics by Lucienne Day, and leaf through a range of zines, maps and books, while the building around you radiated optimism and repose. Among the books on sale were two about the architecture of postwar South-East London: Ana Francisco Sutherland’s Modern Buildings in ...”

“... newspaper in hand. He catches up with him at the physics department, where they’re joined by E.O. Lawrence, the director of Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory. As a theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer doesn’t believe the story. ‘It’s not possible,’ he says: the massive uranium atom is too stable; splitting it into two other largish nuclei would ...”

“... infilling its hollows with embankments, adding to the alterations already made to the landscape by abandoned quarries that had left behind manmade cliffs of whinstone and ponds of dark, still water. By the 1950s the only farmland left was a potato field and a stretch of grazing that supported two Clydesdale horses we knew ...”

“... Banks had a different idea. (‘Every blockhead does that,’ he said. ‘My grand tour shall be one round the whole globe.’) At Eton, he had discovered a love of botany (as one does). He followed Linnaeus’s new programme of systematic classification; and he looked for ways to spend a lot of time exploring and collecting plants. Around 1766, an ...”

“... is written in the shadow of The Crown, ‘the popular Netflix series’ in which she was played by Nancy Carroll with Helena Bonham Carter as Margaret. In the book’s prologue, she describes Bonham Carter, who ‘as it happens’ is a cousin of Glenconner’s late husband, Colin Tennant (Lord Glenconner), coming for tea and taking copious notes. It was at ...”

“... terrible cost in lives and money. How bad was it? In a way it was worse than a defeat, because to be defeated, an army and its masters must understand the nature of the conflict they are fighting. Britain never did understand, and now we would rather not think about it. The troops are home from a campaign that lasted 13 years, including Iraq in the ...”

“... of Azra, south-east of Kabul. Early in 2011, going home on leave, he was called to account by local Taliban as a collaborator and told he would have to take part in a car-bomb attack on a nearby hospital if he wanted to redeem himself. He couldn’t return to his regiment without putting his family at risk and he couldn’t stay in Azra, so he left the ...”

“... archival heaps of newspapers and magazines. Should these two streams of paper merge they would not be easily separated. The postwoman hasn’t given up. She had a similar problem with the other private mail company she works for, Sandd, a few years back. ‘When I began at Sandd in 2006 I delivered about 14 boxes of mail every time,’ she said. ‘I ...”

“... there was a revolution in the first place. The bulk of Western media commentary seems still to be wedded to this notion. That what the media called ‘the Arab spring’ was a succession of revolutions became orthodoxy very quickly. Egypt was indispensable to the idea of an ‘Arab spring’ and so it had to have had a revolution too. In part this was ...”