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“... account of the siege of Derry. In the winter of 1688 the Catholic forces of the recently deposed James II surrounded the largely Protestant city. Its governor, Robert Lundy, wanted to negotiate surrender as they didn’t have the resources to withstand a prolonged siege. But thirteen apprentice boys defied him and closed the gates. Lundy was ...”

“... a nicely turned-out postman picking his way through the rubble lining Frankfurt’s city hall. In Munich, Lee Miller was photographed soaping herself in Hitler’s bath. Walter Sanders caught the wife and daughter of an American soldier drinking tea in a luxurious dining car, looking out at the train next to them, in which DPs were squashed into ...”

“... forewoman in a sweet factory, goes beyond ‘jingoistic sentiments … paraded in the music hall and the public house’, Glover writes. ‘Here is an anti-semitism that is ready to leave the street corner for the political platform, to make its stand as something other than vulgar prejudice.’ It was fuelled by the popular perception that Jews ...”

“... Chris Cook, used to be an adviser to David Willetts; or that Nick Robinson, shortly to replace James Naughtie on Today, was once president of the Oxford University Conservative Association. Doubtless most of the time these men do a bang-up job, suspending their personal beliefs in the service of professional integrity. Nor, in its manifestations, can bias ...”

“... giant building, that high-bounding wall/Those bare-worn walks, that lofty thund’ring hall …/… a prison, with a milder name’. Still, this game of identification shows how strong the legend of the workhouse is, and how obsessive the need to commemorate an iniquity long since ended, but never completely atoned for or sufficiently deplored. We ...”

“... in Manchester in 1857 it was seen by 1.3 million visitors, and two years later the photographer James Robinson had the bad taste to make stereoscopic images of it, so that the viewer could enter the scene of the suicide in 3D. At times the authors’ tone (perhaps inadvertently) succumbs to bombast: ‘a stellar roll call of American poets who took their ...”

“... Gaspar go out first, but instead of heading straight downstairs, the boy took off running down the hall. At first Juan thought he was making for the elevator. But then he realised Gaspar had sensed the same thing he had, though with one big difference: instead of avoiding it – Juan was so used to those presences that he ignored them – he was drawn to it ...”

“... near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room’. Eliot had referred in 1918 to Henry James’s ‘merciless clairvoyance’ as a perception of relations rather than entities: ‘It is in the chemistry of these subtle substances, these curious precipitates and explosive gases which are suddenly formed by the contact of mind with mind, that ...”

“... opposite Eel Pie Island, then sit for a while in the gardens of Orleans House, the octagon by James Gibbs c.1720, and all that remains of the house lived and entertained in by Caroline of Ansbach. The garden has some tall trees, the upper branches of which are alive with bright green and yellow birds which twitter like hawks. I look them up when I come ...”

“... fondness for 1980s bands like The Smiths is best understood, his biographers Francis Elliott and James Hanning suggest, as a mutation of county philistinism rather than a populist affectation.* His social liberalism, when not merely the product of good manners, seems to be a recent acquisition, while his mind-broadening PR job at Carlton TV was, Elliott and ...”

“... them and hangs them up in his apartment. He gets the pleasure of Charles I pacing a banqueting hall replete with Van Dycks. Hilfiger gets to feel he has captured the thing that is truly seen to capture his time. The spirit of the age is a bundle of famous rags. Going, going. Gone. But what of poor Marilyn herself? What is she? And who was she before all ...”

“... walls still look impressive, even from the bench), but, dissatisfied even with the enormous hall and galleries added by John of Gaunt in the 14th century, he then built what was in effect a whole new Tudor palace within the medieval walls. This entire section of the castle, together with a state-of-the-art garden installed at a speed which would do ...”

“... way . . . In fact, the coach in question is quite a good coach and will probably end up in the Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. He and Henry are almost exactly alike as human beings. It’s not unusual for people to talk this way to Frank. After all, he used to be a writer, and it sometimes seems that almost everyone he meets thinks that that makes it OK for ...”

“... looking for his copy of Nine Stories, on the inside cover of which he had made a list of the James Bond-style gadgets his grandfather had developed before being deployed in Europe. The book is there but the inside cover is blank, the tiny mystery solved when he works out that he and his first wife both had a copy of the book, and had inadvertently ...”

“... which I suppose was handy for the courts, still functioning across the road in the town hall with the whole complex – town hall, library, courts – an expression of the confidence of the city and its belief in the value of reading and education, and where you might end up if they were neglected. It’s a High ...”