“... a pool of water in a blue dress. Another was of Hania, aged two, rolling down a hill of daisies by Ladbroke Grove.In the 15th century, ‘tower’ was another way of naming heaven. But Rania always felt Grenfell Tower was too tall. They were at the top and you could see the Hammersmith and City trains coming in and out of Latimer Road Station. From some of ...”

“... a case of believing is seeing, rather than the other way around.His faith was sometimes tested by discrepancies between the map and the territory, though it wasn’t clear to me whether he believed the ground or the map to be at fault (that it might be the map-reader never entered the ...”

“... the president looked wildly about for his minister of culture. But she was being addressed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘Jean Genet,’ said the Queen again, helpfully, ‘Vous le connaissez?’ ‘Bien sûr,’ said the president. ‘Il m’intéresse,’ said the Queen. ‘Vraiment?’ The president put down his spoon. It was going to ...”

“... the old-fashioned spirit of political economy. The story of modern economic thought can after all be told as the shift from political economy, as its practitioners thought of it, to the discipline now simply called economics. With the ‘marginal revolution’ of the 1870s (named for Jevons’s theory of ‘marginal utility’), economics acquired a true ...”

“... City estate in northern Berlin, one of a cluster of social housing projects from the Weimar era to be given a Unesco World Heritage listing. It is a commonplace that modern architecture in Britain, as an ideology, was an import from interwar Central Europe – dropped off en route to the US by Mendelsohn or Gropius, and ...”

“... I wasn’t expecting – what I don’t think anyone was expecting – was that ten years would go by quite so fast. At the start of 2008, Gordon Brown was prime minister of the United Kingdom, George W. Bush was president of the United States, and only politics wonks had ever heard of the junior senator from Illinois; Nicolas Sarkozy was president of ...”

“... caution, bipartisan to a fault, should have provoked such ferocious white resistance – fanned by the man who questioned the validity of his birth certificate and then succeeded him as president. This most eloquent champion of ‘post-racialism’ may have been the most powerful man in the world, yet he remained a prisoner of his race, of his ‘black ...”

“... as the international observers from the Carter Center declared. And a failed referendum would be even worse than no referendum at all: it would open the door to all of Khartoum’s objections, and lead straight to another civil war. But the autonomous government of South Sudan refused to make any concessions: ‘The date [of the referendum] is ...”

“... while phrases that were once so common as to escape notice become in time unusable. It will be a long time before historians can adequately chart, let alone explain, the changes in public discourse in Britain in the past half-century, but when that task is attempted, official publications will have a special evidential value. They tend not to bear the ...”

“... natives grading into Portuguese without shame, a grilling sea-wall, its pavement burst up by the waves, houses built on white piles, with chickens ducks cookery and washing sharing the basement, a desolate and grilling public garden, and the sea full of floating brown pennies of oil. This short passage shows a spontaneous poetic flair rarely equalled ...”

“... of the murderer either, at least not the profile of the kind of murderer he was made out to be. He was a school dropout, but had a wealthy Italian adoptive family; he had been arrested a couple of times, for petty theft and drug dealing, but had never been abnormally violent; he was also good friends with Kercher’s new boyfriend, Giacomo Silenzi, who ...”

“... pure removed. Nor does she need to reel off alexandrines to make an effect. You can tell just by looking she’s One Tragic Babe. What to do? (Gasp, splutter, cough cough!) It is clear what Willa Cather – lifelong connoisseur of big-bosomed tragédiennes – would have done: snatch up La Duse and let gabbly old Bernhardt go to hell. In her new book on ...”

“... country, trench warfare had begun in mainland Europe and invasion was feared, the slogan chosen by the copywriters was nothing if not spunky: ‘Why bother about the Germans invading the country – invade it yourself by Underground and the motor bus.’ Farringdon Road is built on what used to ...”

“... head rolled. The great portcullis descended, and then there was a click, and the scene went dark. By the time the next person stepped up to the box, and another penny dropped, and the portcullis rose on the first tableau, the head was back on the young queen’s shoulders, and she was ready to meet her stern tormentors once again, to pit in vain her beauty ...”

“... that a single one was worth as much as a fancy canalside house in Amsterdam. You don’t have to be Warren Buffett to see that the disconnect between price and value was based on delusional thinking.Most bubbles aren’t like that. Even the South Sea Bubble, the event which gave its name to financial bubbles, had an underlying rationale: who can deny that ...”