“... 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 ...”

“... Next time it will be different. Or so almost everyone in Scotland now believes, as they look forward to another election and back over the long trail of wreckage from 1979 to the present. The Conservative regime began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis ...”

“... who the culprit was, that he lived locally and that he was mentally-ill – and so was unlikely to be prosecuted. The policeman, a PC Sullivan, seems to have made the connection between Bartlett’s attacker and the elusive subject of an abortive Mental Health Assessment he had attended the week before. He later, rather unconvincingly, denied all this and ...”

“... laugh. It’s a rather wandering service with plenty of time to reflect that, as always, it will be the jokes one will most miss and how at the regular suppers we used to have at L’Etoile we always told each other the same stories. They were generally of Alan’s romantic escapades or of other people’s bad behaviour, a favourite being how, after a ...”

“... art. A sign explains that German Jews thought that they could become part of the dominant culture by embracing the ideals of Bildung – a belief formed by engagement with art, philosophy and learning – which this room embodies in the way a 17th-century Dutch interior displays order and cleanliness. The exhibit is ...”

“... and resourceful. To vary what Mallarmé says about himself (Lowell quotes it in his last book, Day by Day), here was someone who had the good fortune to find a style that made writing possible. By comparison with him, other poets don’t use language, don’t write about the world. For many years, the Collected Poems that ...”

“... to move south of the river to get them. When house prices began to go up, this area began to be colonised by bankers and City types. We were the last non-City people to move into the street where we live – the last of the aborigines. These days, as houses become an ever more critical capital asset, there is a ...”

“... looms, nature documentaries have become big business. The last six years have seen a succession of David Attenborough hits: Blue Planet II, Dynasties and Dynasties II, The Green Planet and Frozen Planet II on the BBC; and on Netflix, Our Planet, A Life on Our Planet and Planet Earth II. Attenborough’s most recent series, Wild Isles, was watched ...”