“... Democratic Progressive Party, a new director of the Palace Museum is chosen. Lin Jeng-yi took up the position early last year when Tsai Ing-wen was elected as Taiwan’s first female president. It is Lin’s job to explain to the Democratic Progressive Party, and to the Taiwanese, why they should be responsible for a vast collection of Chinese ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... He christened the first ‘Kilseen’, a tease on her acting abilities, but she and their friends took pleasure in the nickname and she certainly loved him. Constance was what David Cecil calls ‘a full-blooded woman’ who soon started an affair with her principal man and allowed Max to slip gracefully away. The lady he eventually married, Florence ...”

“... the Home Secretary. Shortly before he was due to be flown out of the UK en route for New York he took an overdose and died. With this may be compared the case of Mark Hosenball, the American journalist whom the Home Office decided should be deported as a security risk. Hosenball challenged the decision on the ground that there had been a breach of the rules ...”

“... units, under the direction of the station manager, a 35-year-old engineer named Victor Brukhanov, took up much of the Seventies. Delays, due mainly to delivery failures, meant that the first unit went on line late in September 1977, the second over a year later – a few months before the accident at Three Mile Island, itself a cause for celebration in Soviet ...”

“... One might as well say that Laurel and Hardy were provincial comics. The growth of Andy Dalziel took place in metaphors of which Wodehouse would have been proud. At first only an ex-rugby player run to slabby fat, Dalziel began to burgeon in Ruling Passion (1973), after an antique dealer called Etherege, a diabetic arrested by Dalziel while injecting ...”

“... settled notions of the uniqueness and universality of space and time. Not, of course, that people took an entirely conservative attitude towards their everyday co-ordinates. Even in 1905, the passengers on a steamship to Australia did not try to carry with them, all the way from Britain, the exact moment of twelve noon, or the direction of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I used to want to live to avoid your elegy,’ Robert Lowell wrote in ‘For John Berryman’ (included in Day by Day from 1977, the year Lowell died). The poem is subtitled ‘After reading his last “Dream Song”’, by which Lowell meant not number 385 in the 1969 edition of The Dream Songs but the poem that Berryman composed on 5 January 1972, two days before he leaped to his death from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis ...”