“... utility for all serving politicians, it did look a touch obvious in point of immediate self-service. And the apparently noble injunction – to consider an ex-President as a whole man, take him in the round, take him for all in all – could rebound horribly if it meant raking up things that the country was supposed to have forgotten or forgiven. Within ...”

“... Glasgow, Greenock and Helensburgh in the summer of Napoleon’s advance on Moscow. In fact, Robert Fulton’s steamboat Clermont had started running on the Hudson in 1807, and in the five years before Bell got going on the Clyde half a dozen other steamers had begun to carry freight and passengers on the Delaware, the St Lawrence, the Mississippi and ...”

“... when he and my stepmother were moving house. The coins were in the top pocket of his National Service uniform, which went in the skip, along with a little glass duck that he kept retrieving but finally relinquished when we insisted it wasn’t worth keeping. It kept bobbing to the surface, and I began to feel guilty, so I saved it. Other things have found ...”

“... I knelt and started to pray and prayed for everybody I thought of, Brett and Mike and Bill and Robert Cohn and myself, and all the bullfighters, separately for the ones I liked, and lumping all the rest, then I prayed for myself again, and while I was praying for myself I found I was getting sleepy, so I prayed that the bullfights would be good, and that ...”

“... and scandal, Maintenant was entirely written and published by Cravan: the other contributors (Robert Miradique, W. Cooper, E. Lajeunesse, Marie Lowitska etc) are all pseudonyms. Even the advertisements bear his skewed imprint: the restaurant Chez Jourdain entices customers with the words, ‘Where can you see Van Dongen’ – the Flemish painter Kees van ...”

“... artisans, or Dissenters, or women, or colonial subjects aspiring to places in the Indian Civil Service. I don’t remember the Scots or the Welsh or the Irish being mentioned in this catalogue of the excluded. Uncomfortable with any nationalism except its own, this English critique of English still seemed to assume that literature in Britain meant ...”

“... May 1914, some six months before his late efflorescence into verse at the age of 36, he wrote to Robert Frost of his longing to ‘wring all the necks of my rhetoric – the geese’. He was referring to the over-elaborate style of some of his prose writings, but his first poem, ‘Up in the Wind’, composed on 3 December 1914, opens with a version of the ...”

“... mother, Beth McBride, came from a family of miners and labourers; she escaped from domestic service into the ‘as near as dammit white-collar embrace of Scottish Motor Transport’, as a clippie on the buses. Her father, Eddie Galloway, was a little grander, from a family that ‘could boast a glove-maker, a chauffeur, two cart-drivers and a chap who ...”

“... taking pictures for years at a time. But when he bought a Leica in 1932 he became a purist in its service. He tended to stick to three fixed lenses (35mm, 50mm and 135mm), and was adamant that cropping of any kind was an admission of defeat. In the same year, equipped in this way, he produced two of his most famous photographs: the cyclist caught gliding down ...”

“... to oppose collaboration in the northern and western parts of the country. Pétain’s secret service continued to spy on the Germans, monitoring their radio traffic and passing on decrypted intelligence to the British. Between January 1941 and June 1942 the Vichy authorities arrested 194 suspected German agents and condemned thirty of them to ...”

“... the causes of sin; they urged magistrates and ministers to join forces, to wield the sword in the service of scripture. But, as with the Vikings, who killjoy historians now insist were peaceable farmers minus horned helmets, have we got the puritans wrong?Puritans emerged from chaos. Luther’s wish that the laity act as their own priests, reading vernacular ...”

“... naturally – to Sparta. Its catalogue of model leaders begins with the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, long idolised by McChrystal as a flawed but brilliant military commander, and moves on through a baffling assortment of characters ranging from Walt Disney and Coco Chanel (‘Founders’) to Martin Luther and Martin Luther King ...”

“... ambitions, Toole wrote A Confederacy of Dunces in the early Sixties, while doing his national service in Puerto Rico. The manuscript was submitted to Simon and Schuster, where Robert Gottlieb, after dickering for two years, eventually turned it down in 1966. By 1969 Toole was an English instructor at Dominican ...”

“... in Lockwood refers to Breuning’s ‘doubtless exaggerated’ estimate of the thirty years’ service that Wenzel Schlemmer gave to Beethoven as his best copyist, able to decipher those famously over-burdened manuscripts better even than Lockwood; and the latter elsewhere alludes to Breuning’s testimony that Beethoven incessantly (and at all hours of ...”

“... contributed to the undermining of Britishness. One reason for this, as the Party’s historian Robert Blake comments, is that Tories have always tended towards English nationalism, enjoying electoral paramountcy in the Southern counties, but possessed of far less secure roots in the North or in Wales or in Scotland. Predictably, therefore, the recent ...”