“... The village itself consists of little more than wooden sheds or barracks, interspersed with small garden plots. Many of the buildings have collapsed into themselves; others have been taken over by goats or stray dogs. One might expect the village to be in some distant corner of Russia, perhaps several days’ journey into the Siberian taiga. But it is ...”

“... 1879-82 Irish Land War, stressing the only partly suppressed war of interests between large and small tenants as much as the struggle against the landlord oppressor, and casting a cold eye on the cloak of unity that nationalist historiography tried to throw over the enterprise. He would go on to write critiques both of the modern Irish state in the Sean ...”

“... the head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the former Tory MP Stephen O’Brien, told the Security Council in March, in one of his last statements before stepping down: ‘Already at the beginning of the year we are facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the United Nations.’ It’s a ...”

“... to ‘cronyism’ and ‘orange’ (a reference to the sexual practices of the late Stephen Milligan).Tories, however, have tended to have the last laugh, because, as Edmund Fawcett suggests early in his book, the left has been a ‘rash chess player’, too cocky and blinkered to strategise effectively against its opponents. Fawcett, a veteran ...”

“... distinctive set of button-presses out of the experiences of his life. His Norwegian father made a small fortune by importing pit props to Wales. Dahl’s sister died at the age of seven. His father died soon after, leaving enough money for an upper-middle-class lifestyle. Dahl was then only three. He survived the beatings and misery of an English boarding ...”

“... evolved. The chances of Earth being the only one to have realised that potential seem ridiculously small. It’s safe to assume we’re not alone.That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that the chances of intelligent life developing on Earth were ridiculously small; the chances of it having developed on another planet ...”

“... had a hard childhood. The family was desperately poor. He developed a curvature of the spine as a small boy and remained undersized and hunch-backed all his life. He was near-sighted, suffered from migraine and later from consumption. Yet like so many poor Italians from that background, he was willing to pay any price for culture. Here is a description of ...”

“... was a dog salon, a defunct beauty parlour advertised with a wolfish yellow and blue portrait. Many small businesses in this quarter were shuttered, signed off in a blizzard of graffiti. The single functioning enterprise offered cushions featuring doggy pin-ups, pert chows and shivering, ratty, handbag things floating above black modernist thrones. Lucky babes ...”

“... salutary, as it makes one realise what a vast place it is – virtually an entire city block and a small town in itself. The late Stuart Burge, the theatre director, was hidden here as an escaped POW in the war, which I took to mean he spent this perilous time in the bosom of the family. Stuart always played this down and now I can see why, as he may well have ...”

“... into the whorl of cloud over the Thames Estuary, to confirm London’s founder membership in the small club of cities which have been attacked by ballistic missiles. London, Paris, Antwerp, Tehran, Tel Aviv and Baghdad: that’s all. If the rocket had been loaded with the nuclear weapon that would justify the expense of the delivery system to military ...”

“... left behind in India. Shortly after they joined him here in 1969 they all moved to Gloucester, a small and unglamorous town known these days as Kwik Save Central. Its main claim to fame is Fred West, whose home I jaunted past to and from school for seven years and which has recently been turned into a memorial garden. My father’s fall from grace was one ...”

“... British friends’ and with an unconscious dismissiveness referred to Northern Ireland as ‘this small corner of the British Commonwealth’. Angered by this diminution, Paisley retorted: ‘To Our Lord, puppet politicians are but grasshoppers with portfolios.’ Like any republican he refused, in one of his favourite phrases, to ‘bow the knee’ to the ...”

“... in 1663 when he was in prison, Bunyan says: The doctrine of the gospel is like the dew and the small rain that distilleth upon the tender grass, wherewith it doth flourish, and is kept green. Christians are like the several flowers in a garden that have upon each of them the dew of heaven, which being shaken with the wind, they let fall their dew at each ...”

“... Sue de Beauvoir.I do so hope she’s a relation.1 February, Yorkshire. Last time we visited Kirkby Stephen we were in Mrs H.’s shop when a clock chimed. I’ve never wanted a clock and this one was pretty dull, made in the 1950s probably and very plain. But the chime, a full Westminster chime, was so appealing that we talked about it on the way home and ...”

“... corrective effect of making the (male) reader examine his automatic prejudices. After all, if Stephen Crane who had never heard a shot fired in anger could write The Red Badge of Courage from 30-year-old newspaper reports, why can’t the definitive Vietnam account be written by a sympathetic woman who has listened carefully to a lot of witnesses over a ...”