“... searched Australia for a town called Carnegie so that he could stand in front of its town hall with his body obliterating the word TOWN and be photographed for the cover of his album BARRY HUMPHRIES AT CARNEGIEHALL. Nowadays Edna satisfies that urge on his behalf. She punishes Australia for its vulgarity by personifying it for a startled world, and ...”

“... hundreds of thousands were built, had a bourgeois look. Coventry Cathedral and the Royal Festival Hall were modern architecture on a human scale. Though a high proportion of Londoners were being rehoused in flats, the LCC forbade the construction of blocks more than six storeys high. So there wasn’t a visible ‘social revolution’, or an invisible ...”

“... Raikin in Oxford just after the degree ceremony. Raikin was the most famous of all Soviet music-hall comedians. I had encountered him on the train going back to London and had shown him the first volume of Mandelstam’s Collected Works, which I had only just received from Struve. Raikin was so overwhelmed by it and the fact that he was holding it in his ...”

“... on the RER. ‘A supermarket can provide just as much meaning and human truth as a concert hall,’ she says. (She returns to the supermarket: Regarde les lumières, mon amour, not yet translated, is a journal of her trips to Auchan between 2012 and 2013, picking up a thread that began when she was a 19-year-old au pair in 1960 and would walk around ...”

“... according to the degree of factuality being claimed or implied. A small mistake of fact in Wolf Hall would be more damaging than wall-to-wall solecisms in a piece of work like Ford Madox Ford’s Fifth Queen trilogy, where the approach is impressionistic. The same distinction carries over into modernist novels that are no less historical fictions because ...”

“... letter to Norton: ‘The country is gloomy, anxious, and London reflects its gloom. Westminster Hall and the Tower were half blown up two days ago by Irish Dynamiters.’Eighteen months earlier, a young Irishman recently returned from America, Thomas J. Clarke, one of O’Donovan Rossa’s Sancho Panzas, had been arrested in London. Using evidence of an ...”

“... schools – and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in ...”

“... Hellman accepts the offer. All then is giddy alacrity. Like Jane Eyre setting off for Thornfield Hall, or the excitable governess departing for Bly at the opening of The Turn of the Screw, Mahoney promptly leaves her parents’ house in dreary Milton, Massachusetts, and heads for the sun-dappled Vineyard, revelling in fantasies about the marvellous ...”

“... third Of the Nationalist vole (in Belfast it got more votes than any other party in the last City Hall elections). By the mid-Eighties Sinn Fein had become the kind of political party Adams had long dreamed of creating. Reviewing the Party’s electoral successes, many IRA volunteers began for the first time to take Sinn Fein seriously. Undoubtedly, some saw ...”

“... complained of his pessimism about industrialisation, Edward Said of his Eurocentrism, Catherine Hall of his neglect of women and gender, Tony Judt, after The Age of Extremes appeared in 1994, of his disdain for the protean force of nationalism and his gingerly treatment of the Soviet Union’s crimes. Controversy just helped sales, and Hobsbawm never paid ...”

“... would not affront the portraits of dead Wardens, gazing down from the slowly mellowing oak of the Hall.And now Christie, from The Body in the Library – or rather, three of her typically short paragraphs: The knock came at the door. Automatically from the depths of her dreams Mrs Bantry said, ‘Come in.’ The door opened – now there would be the chink of ...”

“... is embedded as a deep structure across much of his work. There’s a disreputable old music hall doggerel that comes to mind here: ‘You know my cousin Maby?/You mustn’t tell a soul/She had a wooden baby/You see – she was married to a Pole.’ In the world of Coetzee’s fiction, all women are ineluctably married to a pole, being under no illusion ...”

“... Hopkinson (of Picture Post), Tom Harrisson (of Mass Observation), Alastair Forbes and Stephen King-Hall, some of whom became Observer contributors when Astor took charge. But that was years away. In the meantime he started to work for Louis Mountbatten in Combined Operations during the week and for the family newspaper in the evenings and at weekends. Garvin ...”

“... it leaves open whether it is Zoe’s own passivity or the heedless passers-by who are to blame.Peter, a young painter, turns up at her house. ‘For a moment she could not remember him. “The coffee bar,” he said. “You gave me your address. I promised to take you out, one afternoon in summer.”’ Zoe doesn’t remember, but goes with him to a ...”

“... that the New Party had been responsible for their defeat, shouted for vengeance outside the Town Hall, Mosley turned to John Strachey: ‘That,’ he said, ‘is the crowd that has prevented anyone doing anything in England since the war.’ The fascist bully boys who would deal with crowds like that were already insight. A few months later, Mosley was ...”