“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Some people are creative although they lack ambition or long-term aims, and go from one small thing to the next, or produce large works without planning to, by accident or accretion. Some people are very consistent in character, whether or not they know it, a form of steadiness that may underwrite experience of the self’s continuity. Others are ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... they describe, and the ones I could find in a preliminary comparison with the old text, are quite small; but the patience and the care (and the good sense) with which they are arrived at are exemplary, and 9000 instances of anything will make a difference. An ampersand is different from the word ‘and’, it matters how far a line is indented, and ...”

“... set of radiating spikes which can easily be confused with normal tissues. Microcalcifications are small flecks of calcium salts, highly opaque to X-rays, which are deposited in the breast either as part of a normal process of change or as a consequence of cancer; sometimes it is possible to classify them as benign or malignant from their appearance on the ...”

“... they call her Spender,’ Muriel said of the poet in his scampering years, before he became Sir Stephen. ‘She never puts her hand in her pocket.’ Members felt that drinking anywhere else wasn’t really drinking. Coffield’s book is a terrific ode to screeching – as well as a generous social history – and it lobs a multicoloured grenade into the ...”