“... films provide. (‘More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than from any other source,’ Stephen Ambrose is supposed to have said, and for better or worse, I believe him.) But you notice, after a while, that the errors all face in a certain direction, and serve to make the same points, while all the things that are supposed to stay under the carpet ...”

“... Among the applicants, it is reported, were Conrad Black; Michael Milken, of junk bond fame; John Walker Lindh, the ‘American Taliban’; a former Republican congressman jailed for accepting bribes; and a former Democratic governor of Louisiana, convicted on racketeering charges. They were doomed to disappointment. But just before Christmas 2008, the ...”

“... were written to members of the Norton family.) With the Nortons in London, James saw Leslie Stephen, whom James’s father had also known, and met Charles Dickens’s daughter, who was, he reported to Alice, ‘plain-faced, ladylike (in black silk & black lace)’, and visited William Morris and his family. Mrs Morris was ‘a figure cut out of a missal ...”

“... his cast of mind was playful and the Fifties were a time to exercise it, when everyone was reading Stephen Potter’s Gamesmanship and Lifemanship, books that treated life as a comic contest for which people devised or divined concealed rules. It was the decade, too, of what one might call ludic taxonomy. From Arthur Koestler’s 1942 essay we learnt to divide ...”

“... up to £395,000), this is a tremendous example of aspiration coming to fruition,’ says Stephen Oakes, area director for English Partnerships. Inch by inch, the working canal between Limehouse Basin and the Islington tunnel has become a ladder of glass, connecting Docklands with the northern reaches of the City. Footballers, with loose change to ...”

“... story. The Gallions Reach view offered a route map into past and future.My new friend, a true walker in a weathered baseball cap, had once been a local man, from Woolwich. He had escaped to Shropshire but was drawn back time and again. For employment he had been, for forty long years, a dustman (sanitation and hygiene operative) in Newham. I told him that ...”

“... The vision of Pacific America from the high peaks. He was, from the start, a skier, climber, trail walker. These activities took precedence, when he was a schoolboy and young student, over academic work. At the age of 15, in 1945, he completed the ascent of Mount St Helens: ‘Step by step, breath by breath – no rush, no pain.’ The newspaper he read when ...”

“... top of everything else, she has a collapsing spine) and when she moved it was with the aid of a walker. But she came across more as a wounded soldier than a stricken old lady. When I went over the recording of our interview I noticed how full and precise her stories of her life were before her complex of conditions and how, as the narrative shifted to the ...”