“... numbers, Origen, the Great War, puns, madrigals, nail-making, Nye Bevan, biplanes, God, Thomas Bradwardine, Platonism, Messiaen, hawthorns, forgotten martyrs, Iceland, the Virgin, Welsh history, laurels, prophecy, cabalism). The instant sources of delight are lines that reverberate in the mind (‘A solitary axe-blow that is the echo of a lost ...”

“... out (and who is now signing autographs from the door of his bus), or the gleeful grimace of little Thomas Voeckler, the Tintinesque hero from Martinique known as ‘le p’tit Blanc’, who has implausibly managed to hang on to the yellow jersey until Armstrong’s victory today. The ‘instinctive’ rider Virenque was convicted of doping in 1998. He has ...”

“... elsewhere. (Americans ought not to forget that the 1935 Nuremberg Laws did more or less what Jim Crow had effected in the United States four decades earlier without the cover of constitutional hypocrisy. Blacks and whites could not marry in many states until the 1967 Supreme Court decision in the Loving case. Anti-semitism was endemic in the New World and ...”

“... with the clouds scudding over the top. We passed into Scotland and saw a sign for Ecclefechan, ‘Thomas Carlyle’s birthplace’ as one of those brown signs reminded us. Karl thought the town might offer the chance of a sandwich. We slipped off the motorway and inched through the ordered trees to the town, which seemed like it had been put to sleep some ...”

“... Anna exclaimed: ‘Why, I didn’t know I had a half-sister!’ Larsen was five when the Jim Crow laws passed. In the South, she wouldn’t have been able to sit in the same train carriage as her mother (under the ‘one-drop’ rule anyone with 1/32 ‘Negro blood’ was considered Black). In 1907, Marie used her seamstress’s wage to send Nella to ...”

“... he had seen William’s future bride. Another version attributes the discovery to the philosopher Thomas Davidson, who invited his friend to meet ‘the woman you ought to marry’. It may not be clear who saw her first, but everyone seems to have agreed that Alice Howe Gibbens was destined for William James. Having followed up the proffered advice, William ...”

“... had Persian names; two later children, born to his Persian wife, Sima, were called Maria and Thomas.) Between 1925 and 1940, he was really all over the place – not that that couldn’t be said about the time before and much of the time after as well. He came and went between Rapallo and England, where he took a job as a music critic; he did good ...”

“... labour, a way of life’. Her artless title is taken from a letter Helen Lowe-Porter wrote to Thomas Mann after she became his English translator. She was, she said later, an ‘unknown instrument … which … must … serve him to change the garment of his art into a better one which might clothe her for the marketplace until times changed’. ‘Like a ...”

“... institution’: racial slavery. The leaders of the Confederacy, explicitly repudiating Thomas Jefferson’s declaration that ‘all men are created equal,’ had committed themselves to racial hierarchy. ‘Our new government … rests,’ the Confederate vice president, Alexander Stephens, observed, ‘upon the great truth that the negro is not ...”

“... was leaving Swaleside until the morning I was actually going, so you can imagine the rush. As the crow flies, Dartmoor is quite far from London. Wait until you hear the route I took. Left Swaleside about 9 a.m. and was loaded into a sweatbox which was anything but, at this time of year, went to Elmley prison to drop someone off, then on to Downview Prison to ...”

“... the abandoned child in The Death of the Heart (1938), is to be stored for a year with her brother Thomas Quayne and his wife, Anna, in their desirable residence at 2 Windsor Terrace, Regent’s Park, in the expectation either that they might grow to like her, or that she’ll somehow acquire a husband (she’s sixteen). If all else fails, Portia will ‘go ...”

“... push to its limits.’ In my own time, punk and its aftermath saw a blizzard of French namedrops: Thomas Miller – the frontman of Television, who died recently – became Tom Verlaine, while his sometime girlfriend Patti Smith hollered ‘Go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud!’ and his pal Richard Hell traded Huysmans lines with Lester Bangs. One of the founding members ...”

“... and an ambiguous, place,’ Ackroyd says. ‘Where does the river end and the sea begin?’ Crow Stone on the Essex shore and London Stone in Kent, an imaginary line joins them: this is all the information Ackroyd has to offer. How he reached the stone on his own expedition, and how he felt after so many miles, is not revealed. The Isle of Grain is ...”

“... hills and sky and dark water and listen to the silence. There was a faint dusting of snow. As the crow flies, Glasgow isn’t that far away – neither is Belfast – but hills and sea and sea lochs intrude. Occasionally closed by landslides, the road to Campbeltown, at the southern end of the Kintyre peninsula in Argyll, is a huge dog-leg, north up Loch ...”