“... just one, but virtually two generations older, since between us lay those – the cohort of Stuart Hall or Raphael Samuel – who had co-founded the New Left, from beginnings in the Fifties rather than the Forties. His looks assisted the illusion, the handsome features at once melodramatically mobile and geologically deep-set, a landscape of wild scarp and ...”

“... columns of the popular press; the author of controversial works which made news as well as money. No one asked A.J.P. Who? Such tensions are worth exploring; and the more A.J.P. Taylor’s life is explored, the more tensions are disclosed. When he wrote his autobiography, he proposed to call it ‘An Uninteresting Story’, doubtless suspecting that his ...”

“... court. Waiting until we were out of earshot of any government functionaries, he explained: ‘No one comes to my court now. It is total war.’ Week by week, his villagers were losing their land at gunpoint to well-connected Marehan merchants and army officers. Five years later, in the depths of the civil war, I returned to the Jubba Valley. Most of the ...”

“... Peninsula in Docklands back to Farringdon. The floor above the platforms will become the ticket hall; above that is the ‘retail floor’, to be filled by Pret A Mangers and tie-on-the-fly boutiques. On its top deck, the finished station will have a garden and a restaurant with a ‘spectacular timber lattice roof’, and to one side, a large pond is ...”

“... process:Leo: Don’t you ever feel sick inside when you have to ask those questions?Birbeck: No, why should I?Leo: Will you do me a very great favour?Birbeck: What is it?Leo: Call in your photographer. Photograph me – and leave me alone.This exchange happens in Act Two of Design for Living (1932), by which time the audience knows that Leo has just ...”

“... John Wesley had a few words for Sterne: ‘For oddity, uncouthness, and unlikeness to all the world beside, I suppose the writer is without a rival.’ Well, something odd will do for ever if the sensation-seekers have their way; Tristram Shandy has outlasted Johnson’s Dictionary, even in the classroom. Sterne was the first author to come up with fully explicatable – as distinct from explicable – texts, in English fiction anyway ...”

“... Wordsworth quotation was “Heaven lies around us in our infancy”)’. Pedantic, yes. True, no. Room goes in for a lot of roguish commenting but not for annotation when it is needed. James McConnell, The Benedictine Commando, 1981 – For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night. Room: ‘The dedication suggests a quotation.’ And that’s ...”

“... In the élite minority arts of the 20th century, the US component is one of many, and by no means the most important. On the other hand, it penetrates, indeed dominates, the popular culture of the globe with the single exception of sport, which still echoes the British hegemony over the 19th-century era of bourgeoisie and the first Industrial Revolution, via tennis, golf and, above all, association football ...”

“... had sent back to Seville. It was not that she or anyone else objected to slavery itself. There was no moral problem, for instance, about buying Africans from the Portuguese. It was rather that she regarded the American Indians as vassals of her own crown and was clear, as she reminded the governor of Hispaniola in 1501, that they should be treated as well as ...”

“... at the first meeting. But not much bunting flutters in the breeze. Tian’anmen Square contains no special seating. Instead there is a lot of open space With here and there a mildly curious face. She’s here to pin them down about Hong Kong. She’d like to have a written guarantee. The PM’s habit is to come on strong. The Chinese instinct is to wait ...”

“... but in his youth had few other aesthetic pleasures, confessing to his sister: ‘Pictures give me no pleasure, architecture a little but practically none. Sculpture absolutely none, moreover music, poetry and singing give me no pleasure. It is a sad fact.’ He was never sent to school and could not spell. It is all too ...”

“... Herman Diaz, 52, choked to death on an orange; several other detainees tried to revive him but no guard came to his aid. Dashawn Carter, 25, hanged himself two days after returning to Rikers from a state psychiatric hospital. George Pagan, 48, was plainly ill during the nine days he spent on the island, eating little and urinating, defecating and vomiting ...”

“... and an alcove whose wall was thick with black mould. When it was occupied, the patrons used the hall, which was, except for the sink and the hole, indistinguishable from the lavatory. This is one thing I remember about the pub; the other thing I remember is that the pub was called the Jesse James. Someone told me it was named for James because his people ...”

“... into a ménage à trois: the girl loves a soldier, but the soldier is flirting with death. No scene is too humdrum to be energised by the ubiquity of death. In Ghost MacIndoe, Jonathan Buckley introduces the war in the fifth line with the sentence: ‘The postman tipped his helmet to Alexander’s mother.’ The postman wears a helmet? Something is out ...”

“... in the market square’ and that anyone is entitled to have an opinion about it. Lancaster was no egalitarian, he mourned the passing of the upper middle class and the dwindling influence of the Anglican church, but he had the English dislike of experts and ‘the vast army of salaried culture-hounds’ who had introduced to Britain that hitherto ...”