“... Shortly after the Canary Wharf bomb, John Major, speaking in the House of Commons, said: ‘As for the relationship between Sinn Fein and the IRA, I think that they are both members one of another.’ Sinn Fein, he continued, would now have to decide whether it wanted to be a constitutional party or continue as a front for the IRA ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... warned that Linnaeus’s superficial name-arranging was so devoted to efficient causes as to leave no place for final causes – the highest contemplative realm of the mind. Philosophically reinforcing the observations Wordsworth had made in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads about the emotional sterility of the sciences, Coleridge charged that Linnaeus had ...”

“... In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the ‘peasant poet’. It laid the foundations, Jonathan Bate says in his new Life, ‘for both the enduring myths and some of the key truths about Clare ...”

“... travelled to the homes of their customers, especially the wealthier ones, to fit them in situ. John Read worked ‘at one goodman Mann his house at Thorpland’ in Norfolk in February 1661, where he accidentally left some taffety ribbon and an ounce of silk on the hall table. The poor had to make do with a quick job done ...”

“... John Lubbock, Liberal MP and social reformer (he introduced the bank holiday into law in 1871), was also the founding father of scientific anthropology and an obsessive entomologist. Of his many books, the most successful, Ants, Bees and Wasps, ran to 18 editions. In 1872, he presented a wasp that he had tamed (allegedly) to the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science ...”

“... write a novel without a catastrophic turning point, or a shattering final twist. That for once no one should be involved in a freak ballooning accident, or be brained by a glass table, or be wrongly convicted of a country-house rape; that no one should experience a marriage-ending bout of premature ejaculation, or have ...”

“... shattering and glassy, all daggers and plans, while the woman in the wheelchair across the hall from my father’s room in the nursing home struggled all day to untangle an invisible ball of string, or some other endlessly tangled thing. Kasischke’s people are breakable or broken, tangled up with one another, unable to stand alone. Any page of Where ...”

“... to rise during the period of suspense that ends just before the grand dinner at Stationers’ Hall; the winner gets an extra bonus of more sales; and the sponsors presumably do at least as well out of the enterprise as they would by spending the same amount of cash on cricket or golf. Although Booker has a financial stake in some best-selling ...”

“... Osborne writes, he was ‘widely regarded as among the few really great poets of the century’. No slur on the century seems intended here: part of what we mean by talking of great poets is that there are never very many of them about. But Mr Osborne goes on to mention that the poets Larkin and Gunn refused to kneel to the new collection. Larkin said of ...”

“... her, in the words of Pelléas: ‘Vous êtes belle.’ She dismissed him, saying they were both no more than children, and for the next eight years, during which he never saw her, she was his Mélisande, and (transferred to the deep country) the Yvonne de Galais of Le Grand Meaulnes, which was published in 1913. Meanwhile, Fournier – he used the pen-name ...”

“... he wrote in a letter to Grace Norton early in 1885, ‘and London reflects its gloom. Westminster Hall and the Tower were half blown up two days ago by Irish Dynamiters.’Today, the site of the old prison is marked by a bollard that once stood at the head of a flight of steps leading to the river. If you look across the water you can see the headquarters of ...”

“... man, after being forced to strip naked and wash in a common bath, is locked up in a tiny cell with no furniture, where he is given the regulation supper of ½ lb of gruel and 8 oz of bread. In the morning he has to pay for it by staying in the cell and breaking up a half ton of granite with a hammer or picking four pounds of oakum. It is very hard work on very ...”

“... in her arms and hold. Their branches that are grinding Madly together and together, It is no real fire They are breaking each other. Often I think I should be like The single tree, going nowhere. Since my own arm could not and would not Break the other. Yet by my broken bones I tell new weather. How neatly and unobtrusively the verb ...”

“... begun to doubt ever existed. The stamp was discovered in 1931 and in that same year vanished. ‘No one in New Zealand is known to have seen it, let alone possess a copy,’ wrote the philatelist Jim Brodie in an article for the NZ Stamp Collector in 1974. The most important 20th-century New Zealand stamp had gone ...”