“... mistaking the cutter for a North Vietnamese patrol boat, launched a withering attack. In a passage which captures the lunacy of the war and the terror America’s war machine visited on the Vietnamese every day for a decade, Page describes the crew’s desperate and futile attempt to identify their boat, bring the attack to a halt and save ...”

“... is still dissection. That first cut into the great muscles of the back is as epochal a rite of passage as any we know. No surface, no depth of the earth is proportionately so dense with the names of its eponymous explorers as the human body. Over four centuries its every structure – large and small – was the object of exposure, probing, knowing and ...”

“... proved that this was not the case. This may turn out to be Philip Roth’s least favourite passage in the book (if and when he reads it), with its proof that Pierpont, however much she admires the humour he sets down on his pages, can’t notate it herself. Nothing more certainly sours a marriage, above all a marriage of minds, than treading on a ...”

“... for cynics is how many non-lawyers were at the conference which adopted this text, the first passage is of real importance in a world in which many interests, from governments to gangsters, want to and sometimes do influence and intimidate judges. A developed society in which there is no assured recourse to trustworthy courts of law is not civilised. But ...”

“... launches into some flight of rhetoric drawn direct from English Parliamentary culture, that this passage doesn’t ring true or must have caused its author concealed distress. We may admit the tensions, and accept O’Brien’s explanation of them: but an ambivalence has two sides, the devil has two horns, and what Burke both loved and hated requires as ...”

“... of ships sunk’. Reporters​ soon understood they had to be cheerful. Dimbleby’s BBC colleague Charles Gardner was attached to the RAF in France when British forces were falling back to the Channel in the late spring of 1940. His diary records that an officer told the press corps they should ‘go around with bright smiling faces’. Gardner added ...”

“... was a commendably French undertaking of course: he hints as much earlier in his letter, praising a passage in Saint-Robert’s book about the capacity to see ‘beyond the nation, but … primarily through the nation’ (as in seeing through a lens). Debray took this to express an ‘authentic internationalism whose formula is sought in every corner of the ...”

“... life and ‘heavy fetters’ of death in her elegies are reminiscent of the horrors of the Middle Passage. She often writes about the pain of separation, particularly of children from their parents. In a poem on the appointment of William Legge, earl of Dartmouth, as secretary of state with responsibility for the American colonies, she recounts her ...”

“... punched, kicked and dragged by the hair by officers whose ostensible purpose was to clear a passage for the Home Secretary. In the course of the disturbance, 38 students were arrested: most of them before Brittan’s arrival, but some after his departure – after the Home Secretary had delivered his speech on ‘Law and Order’. We need to focus on ...”

“... fell, as we are told, for the ‘left-leaning rhetoric’ of the Modern Movement. The second is a passage from Brideshead Revisited which Rybczynski is content to dangle, as if it were an emblematic truth needing no further comment, at the head of his chapter on ‘Austerity’. The nostalgic Charles Ryder is remembering ...”

“... the academic year 1964-65, when he was a young apprentice academic and Lewis was the visiting Charles Eliot Norton Professor: the differences in age and culture and experience somehow worked to kindle the regard and friendship we instantly felt for each other and found in each other. I was beginning to study the American poetic tradition, and it was ...”

“... and no illustrations offered other than that ‘booby-trapped parcels’ were sent to Prince Charles. (How many? All at once? What kind of booby trap? Was Prince Charles hurt? Was anyone hurt?) Wilkinson also recounts that an Animal Liberation Front member is ‘reported’ to have sent a leaflet to supporters calling ...”

“... dome is an armature of artistically worked steel some fifteen thousand feet in diameter. This passage is from ‘Cities [I]’, one of the so-called ‘urban’ Illuminations that conceive of the metropolis in ways that were proper to London in the 1870s, a teeming, futuristic heart of empire, all grandeur and abjection, progress and poverty, and quite ...”

“... Goldfinger or the LCC’s Architects’ Department, but also that of Lutyens, Giles Gilbert Scott, Charles Holden and lesser lights such as Edwin Cooper or W. Curtis Green. Practically every Georgian terrace they can find features in the book. They disapprove of the City’s ‘untidy and expanding cluster’ of skyscrapers, and are more pleased with the ...”

“... market. Barkskins can fairly claim to be a family saga: René Sel is introduced on the first page, Charles Duquet (later Duke) on the second – both of them arriving in New France (later Canada) to work as indentured labourers before settling on the land they earn by their work – and members of both families are still present in the book seven hundred pages ...”