“... In February, two elderly men met in a Middle Eastern suburb and took afternoon tea. As old men do, they reminisced, chatted about their grandchildren and speculated on the perilous state of the world. The younger of the two had a problem: he had a reputation for being an aggressor and none of his neighbours, or his neighbours’ powerful friends, believed him when he said he had put away his weapons for good ...”

“... himself no longer. I was in Downing Street with the prime minister’s foreign affairs adviser, David Manning; the overcoated figure bursting into our meeting was Jack Straw. He wanted to tell Manning that he had persuaded Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, to add Hamas to the EU list of terrorist movements. His tale of his conversion of Fischer ...”

“... is not, after all, to be found waiting at the end of a deserted lane, or, if it were, we’d never know, because we’d be stuck in a traffic jam on the M5. In Search of England came out of a series Morton wrote for the Daily Express in 1926. It is an account of a journey around England in a Bullnose Morris, written ...”

“... tendency to disaggregate writing into well-defined genres, it isn’t good at knowing what to do with writers who set out their stalls in the equivocal zone where the techniques of fiction and non-fiction intermingle outside the ambit of the novel. Francis Spufford is an almost parodically English figure whose output includes a cultural history of polar ...”

“... his frugality and diligence. Though he drank and smoked himself to death, and enjoyed the music hall and Chelsea Football Club, he refused all honours and never sought a penny beyond his salary, so that when he died in 1951, his wife Flo was left in relative poverty. He was unsparingly hardworking to the end. In his last years as foreign ...”

“... at a drug-house in Edmonton. Walking down the pathways and over the crisp, frozen leaves, I’d noticed how many of the people buried there had died young – you can often pick them out by the soft toys resting against the gravestones. Last winter I came back to the same place. It was even colder this time, and the pathways were glittering as I made my ...”

“... his 35 years at Netherne. This led me, some months later, to an office in Lambeth belonging to David O’Flynn, a consultant psychiatrist at the Lambeth and Maudsley Hospitals, and chair of the Adamson Collection Trust. We walked up and down the corridors of the clinic where he worked and looked at the display of patients’ pictures on the walls (these ...”

“... Do we need another Life of Jane Austen? Biographies of this writer come at regular intervals, confirming a rather dull story of Southern English family life. For the first century at least, the main qualification for the task was to be a relative – Henry Austen, ‘Biographical Notice’ to Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818), the Rev ...”

“... English Literature, and the names most ubiquitous in The Book History Reader, Roger Chartier and D.F. McKenzie, can be found on none of the new Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism’s several thousand pages. Perhaps this is as it should be; to call book history a theory would be to read it against the grain. For many literary critics a decade ago, the ...”

“... of a pharmaceutical company, has always depended on convincing its customers that its products do them good. The customers have mostly been other large corporations, and the benefits Muzak has sold them have been improved productivity and a more compliant workforce. Muzak’s corporate literature bristles with the results of scientific and behavioural ...”

“... they are still very much of the common people. Stagecoach was the director’s own project. David Selznick wouldn’t take it on as producer because he saw it as ‘just another Western’ with no big stars, and Walter Wanger, the eventual producer, would have wanted Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in the leads. But Ford insisted on Claire Trevor and ...”

“... as a musty mid-century artefact, an image perhaps best represented by her most visible legacy, the Hall of the Pacific Peoples in New York, where her red cape and walking stick are preserved in a glass case, across from the display of dog and horse gear used by the Blackfoot Indians. Since her death in 1978, Mead’s reputation has foundered. In the ...”

“... endured till death removed him in 1545. A long run, on ground slippery with blood: how did Charles do it? His family had been gentleman merchants in Norfolk. They had served the dukes of Norfolk when the Mowbray family held that title. The Mowbray line came to an end in 1481, but before that Charles’s grandfather had married into the powerful Wingfield ...”

“... the Communist Party was banned, and two of its leaders, Muslim intellectuals from India who’d been sent to fertilise the barren land which was now Pakistan, were trying to create a party. One of them was a brilliant literary critic, Sajjad Zaheer, who was the party secretary. When the party was banned, they went underground, and Zaheer was put up in our ...”

“... glow dimly. The second plate portrays ‘Library Chief Executive Brian Lang in the entrance hall of the new building at St Pancras’. The lavishly-cravatted LCE is tilted at 45 degrees in the kind of ‘man in a force-ten gale’ snap which Brownie Box instruction leaflets used to feature in their ‘how not to ...”