“... the Tolstoy or Dickens sense, but it’s not Tom Clancy or Dan Brown either. He’s more like the Oliver Stone of American letters: crass, hectoring but passionately interested – and occasionally touched by genius. Charlotte Simmons resembles a very bad Oliver Stone film. Unfortunately, at 676 pages, it lasts considerably ...”

“... be published as The Princess Casamassima and went on a research trip to Millbank Prison on the north bank of the Thames. The prison was swampy, labyrinthine and dark. In the novel, Hyacinth Robinson, an impressionable young bookbinder, goes there to visit his dying mother, whose criminal past, we soon learn, has a central role in her son’s mentality and ...”

“... irrelevant, that is, to the proper concerns of history? Some of this still lingers. Professor Oliver’s new summary of sociopolitical development since remote times – above all, since the onset of metal-using technologies – is all the more persuasive for the prudence that has marked his style of work. Not for him the early illuminations of ...”

“... there were appreciable numbers of Jews among the rich mix of people who followed Roman armies north, to create a damp, chilly and not altogether convincing version of Mediterranean culture in the provinces of Britannia. Yet these Jews of the Roman Empire have left virtually no trace of their presence here, and even the evidence for their nemesis, the ...”

“... part of his book is about sign languages for the deaf: voices that one sees. The same trope served Oliver Sacks in Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (1989), but there is more to it than that for Rée. The quotation is from Bottom’s burlesque of love at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The swain says, ‘I see a voice’ – his ...”

“... that would take him to Quito in Ecuador. Ngu was a teacher at a secondary school in the Anglophone north-western region of Cameroon, where there has been fighting since 2017 between separatists and troops loyal to the Francophone government of Paul Biya, who has run the country since 1982. The conflict has claimed around three thousand lives and displaced half ...”

“... us, ‘the English Revolution was a conflict among three social forces. The bourgeoisie, led by Oliver Cromwell and organised in Parliament, aroused the English proletariat to make war against Charles I, the High Church and the aristocracy. Having vanquished them, Cromwell then turned against his erstwhile class ally, the many-headed multitude, which during ...”

“... of the public in the 1920s. Metroland was the commuter catchment area for the line running north-west from Baker Street station through a string of ‘unspoiled’ arcadias and ancient pocket boroughs into the Chiltern Hundreds and the Vale of Aylesbury. The originators of successful brand names deserve to be remembered. According to Alan Jackson’s ...”

“... poets of the 19th century. He is a dandy of windblown headlands, a Nerval, or Corbière, of the North Antrim coast. Where his countryman Seamus Heaney finds appropriate analogues for his poem-making in rural crafts, and in his delving fidelity to Irishness itself re-creates the accents and intonations of Irish-English, and sometimes Irish, Mahon is the ...”

“... with a ‘deep neck guard and reinforcing strips’, and looks as if it could have been worn by Oliver Cromwell, if it were iron instead of bronze. (There were a couple of replicas that visitors could try on, but one of them was too small for me and the other was being hogged by a man taking selfies; the nearby note about the prevalence of head lice in the ...”

“... and a respect for tradition I filch a couple of branches from the base of a balsam poplar on the north side of Regent’s Park. The buds are hardly open and thus are briefly heavily scented. Now in a glass on the sitting-room mantelpiece they bring a flavour to the room as they have done every spring for the last forty years.Easter Saturday, 4 ...”

“... between the old Roman roads of Watling Street, running east to west, and Ryknild Street, running north to south, might also put it in an area convenient for neutral assemblies. Where better to share out the loot from a successful campaign? As for the historical issue of date, one clue is the presence of eight definitely Christian items, including the ...”

“... the island – a third of the 80 per cent Greek population of Cyprus abandoning their homes in the north and about half of the 18 per cent Turkish population heading from the south to the north. For this, Hitchens maintains, four countries – Britain, Greece, Turkey and the United States – are principally to blame. The ...”

“... not? Legal or not? Playing God? Her existence was made possible by the work of Patrick Steptoe, a North Country obstetrician, and Bob Edwards, a Cambridge physiologist. In his 1983 Horizon Lecture on BBC Television, Edwards described their search for moral guidelines: We have looked for inspiration to philosophers, theologians, lawyers, for their wisdom ...”

“... lopped branches would have been a resource. In Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape (1976), Oliver Rackham makes a distinction between wood and timber. Wood, the renewable crop, the source of staves, bean poles, hurdles, fodder and firewood, is what was coppiced from the same stools or pruned from the same trunks and branches over many years, in some ...”