“... commercial and transport infrastructure – in the relatively painless way that jet airliners took over from propeller-driven planes, made by the same manufacturers and using the same airports and labour force. The competition to create a state-of-the-art electric car for the next century began in the Eighties with another race. General Motors acquired a ...”

“... much verbatim, when I finally ‘awoke’, a good while after it ended). On this occasion, it took a while for the fascination to come. I have always had a difficult relationship with sleep; a lifelong and impatient insomniac, I have spent whole nights not even trying to rest, but reading, watching films, or going for long walks. When I did sleep, my ...”

“... who were kindly invited to the Sorbonne to discuss their hobby, but the history of real French took place elsewhere.’ This mirrored the disdain with which the French of England was viewed by some medieval writers. A 12th-century biographer of Thomas à Becket, writing in Canterbury, assured his audience that ‘Mis languages est bons, car en France fui ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John Masefield, A.E.W. Mason, Gilbert Murray, Henry Newbolt, Owen Seaman, G.M. Trevelyan, H.G. Wells and Israel Zangwill ...”

“... partnership in the Palace of Westminster, and his latest book tells the story of James Pratt and John Smith, the last men to be executed for sodomy in Britain. Pratt was a servant and Smith a labourer; both were out of work when they were arrested, and only Pratt knew how to write. Pratt was 32 and Smith forty. Pratt was married with a daughter; Smith was ...”

“... for John Berger It was called a hand as proof, spotless and caught       like watching a false cuff, kind of. It is a pepper mill or a path like a vision along to the glass door. Her will       and the men, hesitating, end up like a house fire. A tight fit bolts and lands in such a way. The shape of hers       seems to me to lament mere shade ...”

“... ground when I crossed it on foot in May 1982, on a trek in the Himalayas with a friend. The route took us down the side of a mountain to the resthouse we were aiming for, a single-roomed stone building, maintained by an absent housekeeper. Apart from four bare bedsteads, there was nothing inside except an old notice hanging on the wall. It showed the ...”

“... from the family seat at Scone, near Perth, on a pony. The journey to London, which he made alone, took him almost two months, and it is probable that he never saw Scotland again. Although it was a bare three years since the first Jacobite Rising had attempted to place the Old Pretender, James Edward Stuart, on the throne, and although the Murrays were ...”

“... blood.’ The day after the murder, the Lawrences, acting on advice from the Anti-Racist Alliance, took the unusual step of appointing a lawyer, Imran Khan, as their representative – an act of some legal sophistication. Imran Khan was to have a significant role in the coming months and years but it is very difficult, as the police were later to complain, to ...”

“... made of it than either the waters or their meeting deserve.’ This is the English travel writer John Barrow writing of the Vale of Avoca in 1835. Like him, I find it hard to decide on the register of the phrase, so lyrical as a song title, so grandiloquent as a synonym for ‘confluence’; unlike Barrow, I find these meetings fascinating, but I don’t ...”

“... value even to more obscure items such as the Irish writer Thomas Amory’s picaresque Life of John Buncle and The Triumphs of God’s Revenge against the Crying and Execrable Sin of Murder, a popular collection of tales of murder and revenge by the 17th-century Exeter merchant whom Coleridge called ‘honest Murthereo-Maniacal ...”

“... novel, Joy in the Morning. I continued plugging away at this for exactly two months, when they took us all off in a van to internment. After a few weeks spent in prisons, barracks etc we were dumped down at the lunatic asylum at Tost in Upper Silesia, where it was possible to resume writing and I started a new novel called Money in the Bank ... I had to ...”

“... to Warsaw as a young man Singer promised his father ‘that I would conduct myself as a Jew.’ He took a mistress, admittedly a Jewish one, twice as old as himself, and adopted all sorts of goy ways. Polish girls were amused by him and admired his red hair and blue eyes. Even the army sergeants were fairly good-natured when he had to present himself as a ...”

“... I were really tired of you I wouldn’t tell you.’    ‘Then why do you tell me?’ I took it up, hungering for something positive, however small.    ‘I don’t always say what I think,’ was the answer. We walked on.    ‘We are leaving in any case,’ she said. It is deceptively simple, but oddly effective in conveying the fact ...”