“... sometimes perplexed as to why Birmingham had been settled in the first place’. It had no fort, no castle, no major river, no cathedral. Until the 18th century it was overshadowed in size, wealth and importance by nearby places such as ...”

“... of the high wall are mattressed in a tumble of wisteria, helpful to escapees. But the jumper is no botanist, no philosopher of wild places. He’s away before the dog accompanists are let into a green oasis that operates like the Marshalsea Prison: if you are inside when the bell sounds, you stay the night. Low-level ...”

“... in awkward particulars, grit under the eyelid. Areal is what you finish up with when there’s no way out, economically, emotionally, spiritually – with Connex and Railtrack operating the only escape chute. With Quatermass pits for Channel Tunnel links. With chalk quarries made over into retail colonies. With every tame wilderness marked down as a future ...”

“... to divine that something odd is going on behind the scenes of Adam Sisman’s new biography of John le Carré. In the past, would-be biographers have been discouraged from poking their noses into the business of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are ...”

“... Norman Poser is not Mansfield’s first biographer, but he is arguably the best so far. The first, John Holliday, wrote his not always reliable memoir shortly after Mansfield’s death. Then came Lord Campbell, himself a chief justice, whose biographies of his predecessors became known as one of the new terrors of death, and whose Life of Mansfield contains at ...”

“... which didn’t quite fit. The story of attorney Cromwell’s mission to Rome was first told by John Foxe in Actes and Monumentes, the ‘Book of Martyrs’. Foxe had to rescue his hero with some deft literary footwork, turning on its head the uncomfortable tale of Cromwell’s journey to the heart of Roman superstition and error. Elizabethan Protestants ...”

“... in historical revisionism, the acceptable face of entropy, is a pantomime that’s all Dame and no Demon Queen. A Thatcherite pestilence has descended on the dead hamlets – but without the intervention of the Great Handbagger. Wapping is posthumous. It has bottled the fizz of its lowlife past, the aliens, the parrots, the peglegs: all press-ganged ...”

“... the House of Commons like a madman, and kicking the ground with his feet, he cries out, ‘You are no Parliament, I say you are no Parliament, I will put an end to your sitting. Call them in, call them in.’ The Serjeant opens the doors and two files of musketeers tramp into the House. While they are taking up their ...”

“... the better’ for the loss of his leg – ‘Consider, I can have neither sprain nor gout, have no fear of corns or that another man should kick my shins … To be sure, I am a little awkward at running but then, to make amends, I’ll hop with any man in town’ – is at once absurd and defiantly courageous. For roughly three decades in the mid-18th ...”

“... said would make ‘a useful retail outlet’, a facility and a building for which there was no longer a social purpose. Most of the children reading here are black or Asian, with Somali children in the majority. As a so-called economist Littlewood presumably thinks the place would be better used as a Pizza Hut.26 March. Wake this morning thinking ...”

“... volume, and in that time began spoiling the new poems (in proof) as hard as he could. ‘Locksley Hall’ is shorn of two or three couplets. I will copy out from the book of somebody who luckily transcribed from the proof-sheet – meantime one line, you will see, I have restored – see and wonder! I have been with Moxon this morning, who tells me that he is ...”

“... degree of public anger about current levels of immigration.’ Just as Blair argues that there is no point in ‘appearing obsessive on issues like gender identity’ – presumably to avoid further wounding the ‘white working class’, the new holy cow of chastened metropolitans – Mounk indicts a spoiler ‘left’ for being damagingly obsessed with ...”

“... in medieval hostel-cum-boutique hotel formerly occupied by those nutty-crusader Knights of St John. (A few grim-faced Saracens, too, no doubt – especially after Suleiman the Magnificent’s successful siege of Rhodes in 1522.) Cobbled streets around the fortress awash in the fanatic blood of centuries, but we’re in ...”

“... all but anointed his eventual successor. Abbott spoke last at the selection meeting, aware that no one in the room thought she could win. Her speech began with her Uncle Charlie in Jamaica and ended with Maya Angelou. As she spoke, she could see the audience ‘struggling with the increasing realisation that, whomever else they had promised to vote for, on ...”

“... marks of national identity acquired even by Iceland or Finland, Luxembourg or Albania. It has no national anthem – ‘God save the Queen’ is played at football matches, but that is shared with other parts of the UK, who, however, don’t play it (except for the Northern Irish, who are making a political point). It has ...”