“... it three times in the first seven pages Strong begins at an early stage to try the reader’s patience. The description of himself as ‘the young director’ occurs so frequently it becomes almost a Homeric epithet, while the reader, if nodded to at all, features as ‘the average’ or ‘the ordinary’. Yet ...”

“... story. Eric Carle, the writer and illustrator of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, wrote a children’s book about the ducks. And 13 years after the spill, by way of a pupil’s essay, the story drifted towards Donovan Hohn, then a teacher in Manhattan.Hohn quit his job to follow the ducks. His quest to trace the toys threads ...”

“... as ‘Col’, or coloured, on birth certificates. When he learned of the discovery, Guillory’s husband said: ‘Hell, she ain’t a nigger.’ The one-drop rule was phased out soon afterwards, partly as a result of the legal suit brought by Guillory, but it persists in common parlance, in both the US and Britain: your part-Scottish, part-Native ...”

“... Dirk Bogarde remarked when Croall consulted him about the work in hand, ‘everybody adored him, so the book might make rather flat reading.’ Morley’s title emphasises that his version is authorised, and the implication is that his rival’s is not, though it appears that Croall also ...”

“... speculatively ‘onomastic’ paragraph, in which he fools around with the names of Shakespeare’s children, with the words: ‘The whole of this paragraph is very unsound.’ Here is an example of candour rarely matched by Shakespeare’s biographers. Any biography of Shakespeare has to mix conjecture with established ...”

“... me with little to do but wonder how to find the British consul (if one exists) in Vladivostok. So much for the romance of the Trans-Siberian Railway. As we hurried back down the train, she unlocked every loo we passed (regardless of whether it was occupied), until I identified the one I had been in. (It was quite a way back, because the train had been an ...”

“... under clumps of grass torn from the sand dunes. The Mexican navy and the Chiapas prosecutor’s office arrived shortly afterwards. They found a Costa Rican transit document which identified the dead man as Emmanuel Cheo Ngu, aged 39, from Bamenda in Cameroon. Eight castaways emerged from the dunes, seven men and a woman, dehydrated and suffering from ...”

“... that Leander’s ‘conjugal powers’ must have been a trifle exhausted, because the tide was so rapid and strong. He found it easier to swim all the way from the Lido to Venice and up the Grand Canal to his palazzo; and took pride in the fact that he was then still quite hale enough to eat a ‘piece’ and retire to bed with Boccaccio and ‘a ...”

“... could undermine their ability to deal with the tensions that would result from the government’s austerity package. ‘The British public,’ she replied, ‘don’t simply resort to violent unrest in the face of challenging economic circumstances.’ Less than a year later, attempting to explain the riots in London and elsewhere, she denied that some of ...”

“... Ten when Ramsay MacDonald returned from the palace on resigning. He belonged to Chamberlain’s magic circle of lobby men, lunching with him at St Stephen’s Club once a week. He saw Harold Wilson every week too, with the other members of the ‘White Commonwealth’, as the ...”

“... giving the direction pppppp in his Symphony No. 6 when ppp would have done just as well. But it’s also possible to dial things down too far until a sign-off becomes an insult. The Twitter account ‘Very British Problems’ cites the problem of ‘receiving an email ending in “regards” and wondering what you’ve done to cause ...”

“... The ‘Caucasian variety’, by which he meant Europeans, were ‘colour white, cheeks rosy; hair brown or chestnut-coloured; head subglobular; face oval, straight, its parts moderately defined, forehead smooth, nose narrow, slightly hooked, mouth small’. Like many of his scientific contemporaries (there were a dozen competing taxonomies in ...”

“... in Nairobi. But to discover that the Courtney is in Selous Avenue is more of a jolt It’s over a decade since Mugabe and his guerrillas in effect won the war to liberate Zimbabwe, but its capital’s street names are a bizarre mélange. North of Selous the next avenue is Livingstone; then comes Herbert ...”

“... This biography opens with a vivid chapter on Raymond Williams’s funeral. Entitled ‘Prologue, in Memoriam’, it transports the reader to Clodock Church, ‘a plain little building’ in the foothills of the Black Mountains. It is a comfortless day, Fred Inglis tells us. ‘The light fell crooked and the road fell wrong ...”

“... In Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London, she describes the overweening spike of Renzo Piano’s Shard as ‘a glass and concrete arrangement of the Qatar sovereign wealth fund’.* The loudest crimes are hidden in plain sight. Look around, you can’t miss them. The topography of complacent surrender. She has a special interest in, and admitted fetish ...”