“... elusiveness over the grassy ledge, the slope of the ruined brickwork, the man at right bracing one foot on the grass and letting the other heel rest lightly on the bricks’ sharp corners. And the same is true, even more strongly, of Disinganno. We feel the man’s abjection – his lowness – because we get to it from somewhere tangible even lower ...”

“... pools and cinemas and state of the art gymnasia in which no uninvited civilian will ever set foot. These windowless sets, finessed by fashionable architects, are like parodies of facilities promised for the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. And nobody but the owners can get at them. What could be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle ...”

“... a smart office in downtown St Petersburg with ‘Private Military Company Wagner’ in letters a foot high over the door, recruiting mercenaries is a criminal offence in Russia. He flaunts his illegality because Putin lets him. But Putin might change his mind, and Putin isn’t for ever.It’s easy to mistake the river of internet footage from Russia’s war ...”

“... like a hermit showing off her cave, and led me back along the corridor. She had barely set foot in the yard when she began screaming at the other women. Why do you tell such lies? What are you trying to hide? Of course you know Marinkovic. Everyone knows Marinkovic. He works at the hospital. A shouting match ensued and the tense, beleaguered ...”

“... met. The system can be maddeningly counterintuitive; you expect to be able to cover your grid on foot only to find that the building you wanted to see can only be reached by a tube or a bus journey, or by crossing the river. The left-to-right order of the Inner lettering means that Hampstead and Camden come at the very start of the book, which seems more a ...”

“... specify who my fellow modèles en gâteaux might be – the late Freddie Trueman I would guess, Michael Parkinson possibly and Alan Titchmarsh (who’s so amiable he might even do it). A candidate for pâtisserie posterity would once have been that son of Yorkshire Jimmy Savile who seemed made from marzipan. But not now. No cake for James.7 ...”

“... of the place collides with their heightened religious expectations. One such deranged soul, Michael Rohan, an Australian Protestant trying to hasten the end of the world, set fire to the venerable Al-Aqsa Mosque in 1969, and smiled serenely throughout his subsequent trial; the horrified Israeli government was only too aware that his actions had done ...”

“... and animating relationship between the English and their past (his friendship in the 1930s with Michael Oakeshott may have played a part here): ‘Let us praise as a living thing the continuity of our history, and praise the whigs who taught us that we must nurse this blessing – reconciling continuity with change, discovering mediations between past and ...”

“... Acceleration and Transformation Trust, or GREAT. The people behind it – the venture capitalist Michael Eisenberg, the tech entrepreneur Liran Tancman et al – also proposed and oversaw the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation which established militarised feeding stations in southern Gaza. GREAT continued where Trump’s Riviera vision left off. It proposed a ...”

“... different from the big-lunged belt of her talent show days: whimpering and coquettish, with a Michael Jackson hiccup. On ‘Baby One More Time’ it was paired with a jarring three-note riff and an instantly famous video shot in a high school, resetting the pop clocks with a controlled explosion of scrunchies, crop tops and love hearts. For a moment in ...”

“... attempts to draw rigid structures of constitutions’. Yet now they had ‘at once to set on foot an organisation in Great Britain to promote the cause of United Europe’ and to give the idea such prominence that it would affect the actions of their fellow countrymen and ‘influence the course of national policy’. ‘The British self-governing ...”

“... backgrounds. It was popular demand that ensured its survival, despite Stalin’s wavering – one foot tapping to the beat and the other preparing a vicious kick. When the US entered the war, Washington became almost as eager as the Kremlin to encourage the production of films that idealised the Soviet Union. This fascinates Hoberman. In 1943, as he notes, we ...”

“... Thames had long been used as a common dump for human and animal excrement. In 1855, the chemist Michael Faraday was horrified by the river’s appearance and stink: ‘The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid’; ‘The smell was very bad’; ‘The feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface.’ The coincidence ...”

“... notes) Vol. – Volunteer – Thomas Ashe, who died in Mountjoy Prison 25 September 1917, to Vol. Michael Devine, INLA, who died in the Maze 20 August 1981. Above is a dove of peace caged in barbed wire; below the quote: ‘I’ll wear no convict’s uniform, nor meekly serve my time.’ Less ringing, and not attributed to the IRA, is the nearby Bloody Sunday ...”

“... on it. And thus began my father’s second life, as a refugee from a country he had never set foot in.As the ship moored in Istanbul the following afternoon, officials from the British Consulate were waiting on the quay. The passengers (Helen, sheet-white) were bussed straight to the consulate, where they were offered sandwiches, tea, cigarettes and more ...”