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“... He set up the Filey Underwater Research Unit with his sons and a few friends, including Tony Green, who later went on to help found Filey Bay 1779. They took archaeology courses and made research dives from Adams’s boat. ‘It’s such a dynamic bay – the sand is always shifting,’ he told me. ‘And the depth [at which the wreck lies] depends on ...”

“... too much cynicism. No one anymore believes that all or even most of our policemen come from Dock Green. But we still see them differently from the way that Americans, for instance, view their police. Commander Dalgleish, like Inspectors Morse and Wexford, and DCI Jane Tenison are all mythical figures. Nonetheless, the fact that they chiefly use their brains ...”

“... when I see the assistant gazing in horror at my hands, the fingers stained the virulent yellowish green I’ve been sponging on during this last week. As a young man my father smoked quite heavily and his fingers were stained like this by cigarettes – and a nice brown it was, and one which I wouldn’t mind seeing on the wall; if he were alive still and the ...”

“... ideal situation, with the lavender bank just coming into bloom and the trees and grass fresh and green after a week or two of rain. It’s one of the perfect places of the earth, utterly silent and private, the twitter of a hawk the only sound. And it’s the last time we shall be able to come. It’s a warm afternoon and with no one around I swim dutifully ...”

“... a fancy pipe bomb. After she and Hellman manage to reduce some sorrel leaves to a ‘thrashing green potion’, Mahoney turns off the machine and tries to pry free the blade in order to wash it. When it suddenly pops up in the air and lands harmlessly on Hellman’s foot, the scene turns to geriatric slapstick: Her head tipped forward, seemed to wobble on ...”

“... release, were given a ‘fast track’ introduction to the Party. Soon after leaving prison, Leo Green, for example, became director of the POW department. Similarly, Jim Gibney was given the role of Six County organiser within a short time of his release. Green, Gibney and other prisoners not only lent status to the ...”

“... he wrote up in Remote People, one of several good travel books of this period. (Indeed, along with Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure, Waugh has some claim to have invented the modern travel book.) He took to Addis Ababa during the celebrations, its ‘tangle of modernism and barbarity’ giving it a ‘crazy enchantment’ that he likened to Alice in ...”

“... Evelyn Waugh was the greatest English novelist of his generation. Certainly Graham Greene, Henry Green and Angus Wilson thought so, although they and not he won the worldly honours Waugh would dearly have loved. On the other hand, that redoubtable holder of the Order of Merit, J.B. Priestley, did not think so. But then whom would he have ...”

“... attention as they had devoted to the Falklands conflict. Instead of names like Bluff Cove, Goose Green and Mount Longdon, they became familiar with pits like Shirebrook, Manton and Bilston Glen. All good boy’s own stuff. Thatcher herself was clearly not averse to this sort of thing: her special adviser David Hart sent her a typically vainglorious note as ...”

“... meaning, you might say that someone now was flavoured with the essences belonging to, for example, Peter Ackroyd, Anita Brookner, William Boyd, Anthony Burgess and Peter Hall. This is typical, alas. First repetition: Kenneth has left Paris, even though his father has promised to introduce him to the ‘agent who had forced ...”

“... my own views on the origins of honours examinations in late Georgian Oxford corroborated by V.H.H. Green in his chapter on ‘Reformers and Reform in the University’. A giant’s strength is wonderful, proclaims Miranda, but not if monstrously used. If, however, as Metternich said, you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them, then surely you can do ...”

“... most powerful man in the world a good contest: ‘They misunderestimated me’ versus ‘The green belt is a Labour achievement and we mean to build on it.’ (And on the other side of the argument, there’s Arthur Scargill: ‘My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your ability to master words.’) The fact that ...”

“... yer:/Hallelujah, Hallelujah!/We will gather up the fragments that remain.’ In Housman Country, Peter Parker does it by writing the life and times not of the man but of his most famous book: the growing pains of A Shropshire Lad, the vicissitudes of its reception, its cultural ‘aftermaths’. The word comes from agriculture, as Parker points out (new ...”

“... have known of later privatisations in Pinochet’s Chile. Until Bel’s recent research it was Peter Drucker, in his writings about management in the 1960s, who was said to have coined the term ‘reprivatisation’. Nigel Lawson, a champion of privatisation, attributes the dropping of the ‘re-’ to a fellow Conservative, David Howell, one of the ...”

“... at Williams’s feet in the early Sixties, there is Terry Eagleton, ‘as allusively charming as Peter Wimsey’; at New Left Review, when it was embarking on its theoretical turn in 1962, the ‘virtuoso eloquence’ of Perry Anderson was backed by Robin Blackburn, ‘a beautiful, big, shock-headed youngster’ who had read Sartre and de Beauvoir in the ...”