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“... poem ‘The Flaw’, addressed to a woman lying beside him: ‘Dear Figure curving like a question mark’. Callisto’s girlfriend ‘lay like a tawny question mark facing him’. In any case, Pynchon now warns us not ‘to underestimate the shallowness of my understanding of entropy’, or of those scientists the story ...”

“... lacking its third act); Lady Longford’s Wellington (her pen as mighty as his sword); Gash’s Peel (a peerless study of a baronet); Lord David Cecil’s Melbourne (one patrician beguilingly evoking another); Blake’s Disraeli (champagne and epigrams all the way); and Marquand’s MacDonald (Fame is the spur stood on its head). But many prime ministers ...”

“... a surging sea while hurling your weapon at the right spot to kill a whale, the power required to peel the blubber in strips from the body of a whale without making your ship capsize, the care required to run a furnace on a wooden ship without turning the whole structure into a flaming hell. The perspective of Moby-Dick is profoundly anthropocentric, and its ...”

“... more. The oomph had long gone out of them after the Catholic Emancipation Acts of Wellington and Peel, and Gladstone’s Ecclesiastical Titles Act of 1871, which allowed the pope to hire and fire his English bishops and give their dioceses English placenames. Richard II’s prime aim in the Great Praemunire Statute of 1392 was to prevent the pope and his ...”

“... and thirty minutes into the interrogation, the general became unresponsive, prompting Welshofer to peel back the sleeping bag. The general, Welshofer said, had a half-smile on his face. He thought Mowhoush was ‘messing’ with him, and he poured water on his face. Mowhoush remained unresponsive. Welshofer, by now realising that something had gone ...”

“... had riven Wilson’s Government or of the in-fighting which was to characterise Thatcher’s. Like Peel, Heath could motivate his own hand-picked colleagues, but hardly bothered to cultivate the backbenchers. His inner circle observed a mordant sense of humour, set off by a deadpan delivery; the rest of the world saw insufferable aloofness, punctuated by ...”

“... it became a footnote: by the 1920s the historian H.W.C. Davis could refer in The Age of Grey and Peel to a ‘hare-brained and desperate plot’ that was ‘hardly possible to explain except on the supposition that [Despard’s] mind was disordered’. It was only restored to historical importance in the 1960s, in particular by E.P. Thompson, who insisted in ...”

“... It is as though heat had been applied to the language (calefaction?), and made – in Mark Rudman’s phrase – ‘fused images’. Lines from Lowell’s Leopardi suggest themselves by way of confirmation: ‘I could forget/the fascinating studies in my bolted room,/where my life was burning out,/and the heat/of my writings made the letters ...”

“... former serfs had acquired of moving from place to place in search of a better life. Robert Peel’s introduction of Britain’s first peacetime income tax in 1842 – just under 3 per cent on incomes above £150 a year – was, in retrospect, a breakthrough, if not one the protest movements of the era had demanded. For ...”

“... of the roof pressing the sides and forcing it upwards. The dinter would crawl up the gate where a mark had been left, or where the tub was still fast. Using his pick, he would dig and scrape out the floor under the sleepers so as to lower the track. A makeshift solution, but the absolute maximum allowed by the boss, who wasn’t given enough money to pay for ...”

“... ski break underway, time stretching before her – she had a decision to make. She wanted to mark her freedom by lying down. But never during daylight hours had she pulled out her bed. She pictured herself lying on the striped mattress. It did not seem right. In order to have a nap she would need to make up the bed with the sheets and quilt she kept ...”

“... social change associated with ‘consumerism’ and ‘affluence’. These had began to make their mark in the more prosperous – mostly southern – parts of Britain during the Thirties. But visions of a car outside every home, a fridge in every kitchen and a chicken in every fridge had remained remote. As the vision began to seem tangible in the ...”

“... guitar from the school music cupboard – because he was the bass player – and my other friend Mark and I had old nylon-string classical guitars from jumble sales or somewhere, and we must have known at least three chords between us, and we were assuming that pretty soon we’d be on the Peel Show and then before we knew ...”

“... of Dresden used to gather quietly among themselves each 13 February; the newspapers did not mark the anniversary. The rapes were remembered behind a curtain of silence until, many years later, foreign journalists and historians published what all older Germans knew. As recently as four years ago, the German public were shocked when Grass wrote in the ...”

“... On 12 February this year – a month before her own murder – Mrs Nelson addressed a meeting to mark the tenth anniversary of the murder of Pat Finucane. The Irish Times published a petition signed by 1200 lawyers worldwide calling for a special independent inquiry into allegations of security forces and Loyalist collaboration in the killing of Mr ...”