“... normal. The Plath-Hughes mythology presents a problem if the first glimpse you had of Plath’s life was the one she lived while making her poems. That life, those mornings, is never to be pitied. Asked what she found most surprising about Plath as she worked, Clark responded: ‘Her force.’ This in turn surprised me, since I thought that was all there ...”

“... can happen to great houses with ambiguous legacies.The copper beech tree on which Lady Gregory’s guests carved their names is close by. You can just make out some of the initials: GBS, SOC, WBY, JBY, AE. ‘All/That comes of the best knit to the best,’ Yeats wrote in ‘Upon a House Shaken by Land Agitation’. Lady Gregory, Yeats’...”

“... gusts of Welsh wind. We are on a camping holiday, we are lost, and he is trying to tame the map so we don’t get loster. The high, solid hedgerows obscure the view and are not marked on the map. Nor are the wild raspberries that grow in the hedgerows. Nor is the weather. Nor is the man spreading a map on the warm bonnet of the car, catching at its flapping ...”

“... her months behind on her deliveries. She rents a privatised ex-council flat with her partner and so many crates of mail have built up in the hallway that it’s getting hard to move around. Twice a week one of the private mail companies she works for, Selektmail, drops off three or four crates of letters, magazines and ...”

“... London, fed by cheap cladding that acted like solid petrol, the owners of the freehold on Morris’s building and the Manchester fire service had decided it was too dangerous for the occupants of its 107 flats to stay in their homes. They were told to evacuate at once and not return until further notice. The freeholders’ managing agents said they would pay ...”

“... to deny that in most of London, City money has a negative impact on the quality of life. It’s partly that the men, in particular, can be so insanely boring. That may reflect the way banking has changed, become more intense, more time-consuming and more overtly greedy. ...”

“... Rosebery Avenue, towards Farringdon Station. I intended to make a voyage to one of the planet’s more mysterious realms, the point at which Zone Six of the London Underground’s fare map gives way to Zone A, the point that, for many Londoners, marks the edge of the known world. Unless you happen to live there, of ...”

“... for nuclear weapons production’. I heard the vice president say: ‘We know that he’s been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.’ I heard the president say: ‘Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It ...”

“... hung opposite the historical landscape, what light does Interesting Times throw on Eric Hobsbawm’s vision of the 20th century, and overall narrative of modernity?1 In overarching conception, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, The Age of Empire and Age of Extremes can be regarded as a single enterprise – a tetralogy which has no equal as a ...”

“... to leave Camp Abu Naji and travel in a north-westerly direction, seeking to prevent the enemy’s retreat from an area under Coalition control. Guardsman Wakefield was told to provide top cover in the second of two ‘snatches’ – a V8 Land Rover, lightly armoured – which would travel the road out of Amara in the dark. Sergeant Ian Blackett was in the ...”

“... day. From the level of noise as the call centre handlers walk in, they can often guess what’s happening across the country. Bad weather causes a surge in the number of calls: a dense, chattering sound. A terrorist attack is loud. But less dramatic worries are quieter and more frequent: anger at a lost connection, sorrow for a family member who’...”

“... across generation and race. But the enthusiasm he roused, the very force of his rhetoric, so one argument runs, has at moments appeared to be something of an illusion, or even his Achilles’ heel. Despite the passage of the healthcare bill, it remains to be seen whether rhetoric can fully triumph over the crushing anomie of state bureaucracy and the ...”

“... later, there was singing – ‘The Internationale’, peasant war songs, the ‘Soviet Airmen’s Song’ – with intervals of heavy silence. The red flags and banners could not dispel the greyness – of the shadowy buildings, the sky, the crowd – or the realisation that ‘the inevitability of world revolution’ had been postponed, that what faced the ...”

“... In​ 2006, the British Library bought a huge archive of Angela Carter’s papers from Gekoski, the rare books dealer, for £125,000.* It includes drafts, lots of them, a reminder that in the days before your computer automatically date-stamped all your files book-writing used to be a clerical undertaking. It has Pluto Press Big Red Diaries from the 1970s, and a red leatherette Labour Party one, tooled with the pre-Kinnock torch, quill and shovel badge ...”

“... of Belgians weren’t proud to be Belgian, and that surveys revealed Belgians to be the world’s least patriotic people. Statistics like these make me proud to be Belgian, but they also miss the point, because Belgium is something of an abstraction even to Belgians, whose sense of cultural and linguistic belonging starts at the regional level rather than ...”