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“... rejected by the Army, for reasons of age or incapacity, and so the show went on through the Great War. One of the earliest sketches to lodge in the memory of lifelong fans was a skit about the Emperor Napoleon called I’ll Say She Is! Its mode is runaway farce, a pastiche without a prayer for logic, and any sample suggests about as much as any other: ‘Our ...”

“... the oracle was still unfulfilled and guessed that the victories Apollo promised were victories in war, not games. They made Tisamenus a Spartan citizen, purloining for Sparta his five-fold fated good fortune. With the seer onside Sparta began to clock up successes. First of the five was the battle of Plataea, fought against the Persians in 479 BC. The final ...”

“... do the capture and storage for us. Twenty-five years ago, one of the 11-year-olds in my science class asked our teacher why ‘they’ didn’t invent machines to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. ‘They have,’ Mr Cooney replied. ‘They’re called trees.’ But trees are slow growing, and vulnerable to fire and chainsaws, and when they rot or ...”

“... there comes a time when ‘then they went to bed’ suffices; or when the bed is to society what war was to von Clausewitz, a continuation of politics by other means. To remain as interested intrinsically in sex as Colette was all her life long, and as Mrs Hutchins continues to be, requires an almost monastic single-mindedness. Now some of the ...”

“... touch’), and that if you’re not prepared to waive a mark-up on a debt, war will be waged against you by God and the Prophet. One sharia-compliant banker I met last year told me that’s about as bad as it gets. There is also an injunction to forgive debt in a broader sense: ‘If the debtor is in difficulty, then delay things ...”

“... Clinton was so sure she would win Wisconsin in 2016 she scarcely visited). The sport of working-class people voting against their own interests has become a dependable spectacle in 21st-century America. Milwaukee remains one of the country’s most segregated cities, and Wisconsin is a battleground state that was won by Trump in 2016.In Milwaukee, the mayor ...”

“... a series of reforming pieces of legislation by the British government, the Irish rent-paying class were becoming smallholders. Peasants who leased land were becoming farmers who owned land, even if some of the newly created farms were small, and even if the two terms – peasant and farmer – resist easy definition.In 1870, the year before Synge was ...”

“... The rhythm of my notes changed, went in threes, lapped, lengthened.One day in metalsmithing class, I picked up a book called Dynamarhythmic Design: A Book of Structural Pattern, first published in 1932. It is about everything that can happen in a rectangle. The rectangle was the page. I thought of Plath’s poem ‘Stillborn’. I read ‘Nick and the ...”

“... Mating flies, they copulate on the wing, and Sam was having trouble making room for them amid the war-movie excitement and his wish to get things done. ‘I hate these goddamn fuck-bugs,’ he said. He crushed a pair with a paper tissue. ‘Look,’ he said to Terry. ‘They died in each other’s arms. Thought you’d like that.’ Terry’s greatest concern ...”

“... ignorance. Evelyn I had got trained, to a degree, but no one here knew anything of the arts of war. Giant Gazonka? They didn’t know him. Machine-gunning? They simply looked blank. Suppose a camel came in, and they had to command him? They went around with their mouths hanging open, and their noses running, with silver trails from nostril to top lip: with ...”

“... dash to Paris established the rhythm of flight and return. France and Prussia were already at war and a fog of suspicion hung over the city – whence the spell in jail. After his release, Rimbaud stayed in Douai with Izambard’s ‘aunts’, until his mother had him sent back. Over the next five years, the excursions became longer and the returns ...”

“... with the BBC’s senior announcer, Leslie Mitchell, he became a voice of authority, the tone of war and peace, the man whom people heard in the cinema on the newsreels produced by British Movietone. Gamlin was a star. Terence Gallacher, who worked for Movietone at the time, remembers him visiting the offices at 22 Soho Square once a week. Gamlin was a ...”

“... out that the Netherfield ladies, Mr Bingley’s sisters, superior and snobbish and alert to class difference, ‘would have had difficulty in believing that a man who lived by trade, and within view of his own warehouses, could have been so well bred and agreeable’. His wife ‘was an amiable, intelligent, elegant woman, and a great favourite with all ...”

“... say anything,” he said. “I don’t want my wife knowing I’m in the ten shilling class.”’‘Yes,’ Karl said, ‘Kavanagh is reported to have said that he wasn’t an intellectual or anything, but that it was great to have a poet like Auden, with his “well-stocked mind”, with his Freudianism and other isms. All junk of course, he ...”

“... city. Snooty. Cool, like its weather. The natty little old Slav three doors down could be a war criminal, for all I know. Once, his motor scooter, his pride and joy, tipped over and I helped him pick it up. He nearly wept with gratitude, but has never said hello or even acknowledged my existence, not before or since. But that night was different. People ...”