“... what his job has led him to expect. Yorkshire, 15 March. Having seen there was a Bronze Age stone circle (more accurately the remains of a barrow) at Yockenthwaite I look at the map and see what I take to be a narrow and presumably little-used road over from Hawes. It’s a spectacular day with deep snowdrifts still on the tops where we stop to look at ...”

“... meet anyone anywhere to say Ive behaved badly, I think Ive acted as right as any other tom-dick-or-harry who might be keeping company with you [aussi onnaitement que lepremier garconvenu qui pourrate frequente] but I wont say anything about that forthemoment. Célestine’s next letter was from a schoolmaster called Allorent, in copperplate handwriting and a ...”

“... Secret negotiations had apparently been going on for two years between five institutions: the Harry Ransom Research Center at Austin, Texas, the University of Southern California, UCLA, New York Public Library and the Huntington. Three of the (alleged) competitors were within a thirty-mile radius of Isherwood’s home in Santa Monica. The Ransom Center ...”

“... up, Jane Eyre learns about her lost mother and father, and draws strength from them; so too does Harry Potter. Popular fictions concede the power of inheritance even as they glamorise the courage of orphans. For those without an aristocratic pedigree, family piety used to amount to little more than anecdotes about half-remembered relatives. Now anyone with a ...”

“... big fish he offered to Zeus Pankrates – discovered in 1952 and now buried under the statue of Harry Truman in Athens – that he commissioned a stone frieze to mark the occasion. Well, it could be a fish or it could be a large Cornish pasty – the sculptor was not a master of his art. In Rome on 15 October, they ...”

“... being. The mission statement, in Latin, was sealed in parchment and buried next to the foundation stone. In future myth attributed to the progenitor of the EU, Jean Monnet, it was actually written by Marcel Decombis, a member of his cabinet. In English it runs: In this school building children from Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the ...”

“... hard to think of any respect in which the Claimant resembled Roger. He was already 13 and a half stone, in contrast to the wraithlike Roger, and was to reach massive proportions, 28 stone 4 lbs, by 1871. Though Roger was half-French and had grown up in France, the Claimant couldn’t speak a word of the language. Roger ...”

“... his protest that, unlike the compassionate cat, the dog did not ‘shedde one teare: he is a stone, a very pibble stone, and has no more pitty in him then a dog.’ The circularity is instructive. The clown is thinking through things more than philosophically difficult. The animal gains our and the fool’s feeling by ...”

“... through’ it seemed largely thanks to the jolt given by the work of Chris Smout and Harry Hanham: a Cambridge Liberal and a New Zealander. Part of the problem was the shattered nature of Scottish historical explanation, alternately cosmic and dwarfish: emblematic in the fricative genius of MacDiarmid coupled to the impossibile public ...”

“... into the draughtsman-writer. Every figure in each column must be just so, and so must every stone in every wall and every boulder strewn down every slope. The Lake District is stony, to be sure, textured throughout with granular outcrops and scree-slopes like great robes of tweed. Need they have been drawn quite so speckled and hatched, so dotted and ...”

“... in a golden, occasionally leaden, age of light verse (Chesterton, Beerbohm, Wodehouse, Harry Graham, Baring, Squire, Seaman, ‘Evoe’ and, improbably, Housman, along with many others, not forgetting the prolific Anon). Even the newspapers published well-turned light verse daily and the postal schools of journalism began to teach the tricks of the ...”

“... that few people knew what he was famous for. In spite of her book’s title, reminiscent of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Ferry never suggests that Perutz was famous for discovering the secret of life. So what was his involvement in the discovery? What, for that matter, is the secret of life? Ferry keeps ...”

“... well the Nazis treated their Jews’) in Wedding in the north-west of Berlin. Their only child, Harry, whose bar mitzvah Lilli referred to as his ‘confirmation’, spent the last two years of the war hiding in the cellar of his former governess’s house, going upstairs in the evenings to teach her daughters the piano and help with homework. Through ...”

“... for London’s waste. There isn’t much romance in an ordinary boat being rammed, sinking like a stone – with no time for heroism or cowardice or stories of any sort – and leaving survivors bobbing for a few minutes in shit. The Titanic and her sister ships, on the other hand, were the crowning glory of the century of progress. A White Star Line poster ...”

“... Flat-Nose, With-Foreskin-Retracted (Psolos). A sculptor in Greek Antibes even named a phallic stone: ‘I am Delight, servant of dread Aphrodite.’ This exuberant invention of names for objects and other made-up entities provides the background noise of Greek nomenclature and maintains the assumption of meaningfulness. Just as the epithet unraed ...”