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“... pendulum seems to be swinging back to narrative, it is encouraging to find a scholar as gifted as Simon Schama moving in the opposite direction. His first book, Patriots and Liberators, published in 1977, told the story of a major episode in Dutch political history, the revolution of the late 18th century, in a fluent narrative divided into 12 chronological ...”

“... of poisoned land, a couple of miles to the east of the Royal Naval College (film set, banqueting hall for hire, weddings a speciality), that is being prepared for its tent-show apocalypse, has never previously been part of the Greenwich story. The peninsula, if you check it out on a 19th-century map, is a vestigial tail, a pre-amputation stump known as ...”

“... lounge.) In addition to all this, there is an apparently unending succession of books, of which Simon Callow’s ongoing biography is the most monumental, now two volumes in and not even arrived at The Third Man, the 1949 movie that made Welles a myth. Callow’s second volume, Hello Americans, is named after the series of radio broadcasts Welles delivered ...”

“... to supplant the king. On 30 September, before the assembled lords and commons in Westminster Hall, he claimed the throne, which Richard had abdicated the day before, as the true heir ‘descended by right line of the blood coming from the good lord King Henry the Third’. On 13 October he was crowned king. The son of John of Gaunt, Edward III’s third ...”

“... battle in which the main winners were advertising executives, Margaret Thatcher closed down County Hall. The GLC’s functions were privatised, and London was represented in government by a succession of ministers with no particular interest in the city. During the mid-1990s, New Labour announced its intention to devolve power from Whitehall and, once ...”

“... to turn his hand to any job that needed doing, however humble. He worked briefly at Toynbee Hall, which he disliked as too ‘bourgeois’, then was appointed to a lectureship at LSE. While brother Tom became a conscientious objector when war broke out, Attlee volunteered for active service. With commendable restraint in a very full and rich ...”

“... I said. ‘Offences against the person.’ ‘Yes, that sort of lark. Plus I understand young Simon offered her the extra hundred a year.’ ‘Probably luncheon vouchers,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t wonder.’ ‘Occam’s Razor shaves you closer,’ I said. I had only begun to suspect something when he began multiplying explanations. My foot shot out ...”

“... Carlyle’s reputation was sunk long before the Nazis took him along to their Götterdämmerung. Simon Heffer gives a useful account of the ‘long and damaging fall from the pedestal’ in the first chapter of his 1995 Life of Carlyle. The extent of that fall can also be gauged in the acres of cheap Victorian editions still to be found in secondhand ...”

“... challenging music of the post-punk years now, at a time when the public face of the industry is Simon Cowell. Similarly, the teenagers who formed Joy Division found their role models in bands from a previous era that had ‘lifted the lid on things’, as Sumner puts it: the Doors, the Stooges, Can and The Velvet Underground. Like other post-punk bands, Joy ...”

“... The result is a panoramic account of 19th-century literary life. ‘Just who were these people?’ Simon Winchester asked in The Meaning of Everything, his 2003 account of the dictionary. Ogilvie follows the paper trail they left, which extends all over Britain, Europe and the Anglophone world.She arranges her chapters, in lexicographical tradition, according ...”

“... through the play that made Stoppard famous. The two main characters are homesick. In escalating, hall-of-mirrors, Chinese-dolls Stoppardian fashion, this observation throws light on the drama from which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern springs, and which turns from being the main thing to a subplot, becoming a play within a play. The echo of ‘home’ in the ...”

“... showed around twenty NF supporters, all men, giving Nazi salutes as they went into Southall Town Hall. Southall was one of the most racially diverse areas in London: in five wards surveyed in 1976, 46 per cent of the population had been born in the New Commonwealth. The National Front’s candidate, John Fairhurst, had stood in nearby Hayes and Harlington in ...”

“... the prime minister, the mayor of London and the archbishop of Canterbury were all old Etonians. (Simon can’t possibly be the double agent, Rowan Atkinson says in Johnny English Reborn, because ‘Simon went to Eton’ – a nice joke since Dominic West, the actor playing Simon, also ...”

“... moved in with them. Reynolds did. It is as though Wordsworth had set up house with Alice Fell, Simon Lee and the old Leech-Gatherer. In 1906, after several visits to the East Devon coast, Reynolds at the age of 25 left his home town, Devizes, to become a more or less permanent lodger in the house of Bob Woolley and his family in Sidmouth. Woolley was a ...”

“... Fräulein von Kulp                  Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door – and which at the same time makes the hotel-world so fertile for comedy. For comedy proves to be the true bent of hotel-art: a hectic, jam-packed farce of disasters – and since John Irving’s novels are that anyway, powered by a ...”