“... relates to Ernie Bevin’s working-class way with aspirates. We must set up an ad hoc committee, said Bevin at some international meeting, and the delegate from an important fish-producing country insisted that he himself must obviously be a member of any such committee. And – as befits a man who has been at the centre of great events in stirring times ...”

“... his wife, Lynne, if it annoyed her that people referred to him as Darth Vader. Not at all, she said, ‘it humanises you.’ Cheney’s daughter, Liz, a media-friendly blonde soccer mom and the Republican Representative for Wyoming’s statewide congressional district, has none of her father’s gruffness, but she is just as hawkishly conservative. She ...”

“... which agreed that the Queen of Scots, still a baby, would eventually marry Henry VIII’s son, Edward. Had Edward lived, and the union between England and Scotland held, she would have become queen of England, Elizabeth’s ‘sister’. Instead, Scotland turned to France, and Mary was betrothed to the dauphin. Her ...”

“... war party was ‘just’. Like the politicians against the war, the writers against the war – Edward Pearce in the Guardian, John Diamond in the Mirror, John Pilger wherever anyone prints what he writes – have to be winkled out from the chauvinist mass. How to explain the mood which swept otherwise independent-minded journalists and editors into the ...”

“... in various newspapers and journals (the line of influential poetry reviewing stretches from Edward Thomas to Ian Hamilton). Sooner or later, the taste which innovating literary journalists shape and enforce seeps through to institutions of higher education, which then disseminate it to their students, many of whom transmit it to the next generation of ...”

“... with a perception until it turns into a conceit. Pheasants on the Icknield Way – which is said to be one of the oldest roads in Britain, predating the Romans – have ‘copper flank armour and white dog-collars (hoplite vicars)’ and a grebe on a pond is ‘punkishly tufted as Ziggy Stardust’. Starlings have feathers ‘sleekly black as sheaves of ...”

“... clearly defined. Riggs touches on it briefly in connection with Jonson, to whom Shakespeare is said to have administered a ‘purge that made him bewray his credit’ (i.e. ‘beshit’ himself, as Riggs glosses). Duncan Salkeld gives a lively account of the brief and pungent career of George Wilkins, a little-read author who combined literature with a ...”

“... There is something to be said for encountering some years after publication a fictional work not only popular but critically acclaimed. What is novel in the subject-matter will have become familiarly known, something particularly relevant to J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, which fascinated some of its early readers and reviewers because it was based on the writer's childhood experiences while interned in Shanghai during World War Two ...”

“... deterrent and 11 per cent are undecided – blessed followers of St Thomas. The man in the pew is said to support the nuclear deterrent. No figures are given for this assertion. The vocabulary used in discussing nuclear weapons is peculiarly misleading, almost as though the nuclear advocates are ashamed of what they are advocating. The nuclear weapons are ...”

“... because of their superior wealth and self-sufficiency. ‘It is the Florida effect,’ he said in a House of Commons speech. ‘People want to go to southern European countries, but they take their wealth with them, which would be welcomed even if we were not members of the EU because poor countries always want to attract rich migrants.’ Which ...”

“... novel and fifth book; her first books had been biographies, of her father’s famous family and of Edward Burne-Jones. She was 62 when she won the Booker, a widow and the mother of three grown-up children, and although no longer in straits as desperate as those she had drawn on for the novel, she was accustomed to making do on very little. She lived on the ...”

“... Africa weren’t all that different from those of their counterparts in Europe, even a figure like Edward Chambré Hardman, whose father enjoyed photography and whose real passion – for landscape and cityscape – lay beyond the portraits he took in Liverpool in the 1940s and 1950s. (Hardman was still taking portraits for a living after his photograph of the ...”

“... among his fans Dr Johnson (‘For a broad laugh I must confess the scoundrel has no fellow’) and Edward Gibbon, who told his sister in a letter: ‘When I am tired of the Roman Empire I can laugh away an evening at Foote’s theatre.’ Yet he died, said Garrick, excusing himself from the funeral, ‘very little regretted ...”

“... her husband, their surviving son and their servants, the household included their new friends Edward and Jane Williams, their children and servants, and Mary’s half-sister, Claire Clairmont.Clairmont’s five-year-old daughter with Byron, Allegra, had died of typhus (or possibly malaria) only a few days earlier, in the convent near Ravenna where her ...”

“... must always increase with time. Whatever we do, entropy goes up (as Allen Ginsberg reputedly said, ‘You can’t break even’). This suggests a compelling hypothesis for the end of the world: the universe will reach maximum entropy and thereafter be a dark place of spent heat where nothing happens. Yet life seems to defy physics. Our bodies produce ...”