“... was a fine thing (our entry was acclaimed by the whole of the press as well as by Neil Kinnock and John Smith): a view which held until, roughly, September 1992, when the conviction grew on all sides that it had been a colossal mistake. Few will argue with John Major’s asssumption that the 1997 election was lost on Black ...”

“... This, finally and belatedly, is a justification for Fifa’s policy of expanding the Cup. They took the number of teams up to 24 in 1982; the reasons were essentially political, to do with soliciting votes from the Third World. The result was 1. that there were too many duff teams and 2. there was a problem in then reducing the numbers to 16 for the ...”

“... started out in London more than fifty years ago his subjects were mainly party people. In 1966, he took a picture with his Leica of someone he’d never heard of: Oskar Schindler. ‘It is not an exciting shot,’ he once said. ‘But it exists. It is just about the only photograph I have seen of Schindler.’ David Bailey, or Antonioni’s Blow-Up, was one ...”

“... the time I met the leopard the gold had faded to beige and the black spots to donkey-brown. Once I took the photos into primary school, thinking to impress the girls with the exoticism of my family history. It didn’t go as I’d hoped. It wasn’t that they mocked the notion of an undersized ten-year-old in grey flannel shorts and National Health Service ...”

“... never ceased to love her from that moment.’ The person who said that was known as Christopher St John, though her real name was Christabel Marshall. We know how she felt about the object of her passion, Vita Sackville-West, because she kept a ‘love-journal’ in Vita’s honour. Miss Sackville-West, who had recently (and most unusually) been abandoned by ...”

“... John Lennon gave his famous interview to Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine at the end of 1970, a few days before the release of the most important solo-Beatle record, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Rolling Stone published the interview early the following year, with the album already in the shops ...”

“... In 1735​ , the Duke of Richmond was in search of a sloth bear. He took delivery of an animal but wasn’t happy with what had arrived. ‘I wish indeed it had been the Sloath that had been sent me, for that is the most curious animal I know, butt this is nothing butt a common black bear, which I do not know what to do with, for I have five of them already,’ he wrote to Hans Sloane, who had acted as his buying agent ...”

“... the word was with God; at the end, a passage in Revelation describes an angel appearing to St John holding an open book and instructing him to eat it: ‘it will make your stomach bitter, but it will be as sweet as honey in your mouth.’ In the 12th-century Glossa Ordinaria, the standard set of medieval biblical commentaries, some passages of the Bible ...”

“... of other kinds.In the event, Flanigan tells us, Cambridge did not attack Christiana, because she took another road that day. ‘Thus thwarted in his views of obtaining revenge, his designs upon Mr Brown gained double hold.’ Unaware of the fate awaiting him, the overseer rode home, and was struck down between two fields of sugar cane. ‘The negroes say ...”

“... the end to more than the first and definitively gripping impression. It is possible that Kipling took such things more lightly than his critics. He could certainly be extraordinarily careless, as when, in the flawed but fascinating story ‘Wireless’, he himself misquotes ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (‘moonlight’ instead of ‘moonshine’), which a ...”

“... Among the illustrations in this book is a painting by John Closterman of the Marlborough family which hangs today in Blenheim Palace. On its right-hand side, as convention dictates, sits the head of the family, John Churchill, at the time of the painting, first Earl of Marlborough ...”

“... of mixing them together, as in a mouthful of beef and plum pudding. In England, the aristocracy took up the new fashion, and imported French cooks along with French tailors, French dancing masters, French musicians and French language tutors. Before too long these trends provoked a ferocious patriotic reaction. Novelists, dramatists and journalists all ...”

“... have fallen. The majority of the fall happened in the first years of this century, as computers took more and more of a role in the markets. We would reasonably expect that to lead to a fall in costs, and therefore a fall in spreads – that’s the whole point of using computers, from the customer’s point of view. The HFT players want to take the ...”

“... most of it – layers of thermal clothing, a good map, a pocketful of energy bars in case the walk took longer than expected – but, really, this wasn’t one of those serious, adventure trail, orienteering-type walks. It was just a last wander to say a mental goodbye before driving my hire car back to Lakselv and taking the shuttle plane down to Tromsø to ...”

“... than a philosopher, and, for all the suggestive ways in which he anticipates modes of thought that took off only long after his death, not to be filed away merely as a sort of erratic precursor. Some of the definitions he finds for the exotic in the ‘Essay’ are so inflated as quite to swamp the normal extension of that term: at one moment he has it that ...”