“... and influential writers and preachers of his age to a dull and worthy figure. Both Greaves and Michael Davies appear to accept, and even collude with, Bunyan’s diminished presence in contemporary British culture. Bunyan, however, remains an enduring presence in Ulster Protestantism. In a lecture given many years ago, ‘The Triumph of the Word of God in ...”

“... vision of the dedicated District Officer, attired in pith helmet and spine pad, bent low under the white man’s burden, followed by a line of unfortunate and heavily perspiring Africans, in their turn burdened more directly by bedding roll, portable canvas wash basin, ceramic water filter, cases of whisky, and brass-bound thunderbox. When the European ...”

“... with volumes devoted to the American ‘empire’. But how appropriate is this evocative term? Michael Mann has been working for two decades as ‘a historical sociologist on the nature of power in human societies’. In this dense and lively volume, composed ‘at breakneck speed’, he analyses and evaluates the main strands of US global influence, with ...”

“... major blight, a steady stream of ‘I-Spy’ water fowl. Fish corpses (nothing more exciting than white-bellied carp). I think we can assume that we have penetrated the Lea Valley’s recreational zone. Boats. Wet suits. Easy access to the North Circular Road, the broken link of an earlier orbital fantasy. This border is marked by a permanent pall of thick ...”

“... Maurice Hewlett and my favourite, the Arthur Conan Doyle of the Brigadier Gerard stories and The White Company. As Adrian and Michael Cox’s Oxford Book of Historical Stories may confirm in due course, I suspect that there has been a continuous tradition from the great Victorians right through to Patrick O’Brian ...”

“... disconcerted by Margaret’s genteel chain-store ways; her ‘standard English was the off-white kind favoured by hotel receptionists and vendeuses of posh slap’; Daisy is a hyperaesthete of choice and rare vocabulary (the fact that she’s half-Dutch is, I think, suggested as an explanation for her preternaturally keen ear for diction and ...”

“... of 1964 and George Brown) and will promote information technology and biotechnology (‘the white heat of a new industrial revolution’ revived). But he then shows a lack of coherence that suggests that he neither understands nor cares. Labour ‘should become a party of sound money’ because its supporters are the worst hit by inflation (not, on the ...”

“... at Henley and John Outram’s Isle of Dogs pumping-house. It stretches to high technology in Michael Hopkins’s stand at Lord’s cricket ground and to eclectic neo-vernacular in Jeremy Dixon’s crow-stepped-gabled housing in Docklands. Among the targets for the Prince’s brickbats are London’s Royal Free Hospital, most new building in the City of ...”

“... Italy and that the areas of poverty precisely corresponded to the areas of poverty of that land. Michael Foot, she feels, is altogether too old and she did not share his belief that if Reagan could make it to the White House he could do the same. She adds the surprising comment that he is more suited to the trench warfare ...”

“... At the same time, the War Cabinet sanctioned an expedition to Murmansk to fight the Germans and White Finns, first in co-operation with the local Bolsheviks but soon in opposition to the wishes of the Soviet Government. Presenting entirely new information far beyond the imaginings of a novelist, Mr Kettle describes how the British competed with the Germans ...”

“... already had a couple of unsettling epiphanies this soccer year. Out of habit, I battled my way to White Hart Lane on the first day of the season, expecting to savour the ten-year-old’s sensations I’ve been savouring for thirty years: the verdant sward, the August sun, the eager, shirt-sleeved throng and, best of all, the certain knowledge that my ...”

“... still quiet – a far cry from its days as a fruit and flower nexus. I read in the Observer that Michael Caine’s father had worked in one of the London markets. Now the Market – like Caine – is gentrified, no stalls, shops or clientele operating much before 11 a.m. The figures, when we spread them out on our desk, are still below profitability, but ...”

“... and poisoning. He is at his best when he lets himself be carried away. Diving into the sea is a ‘white-noise smash, followed by a sudden, astonishing emergence in a silent blue world’. Contemplating the rock through which Victorian engineers ‘punched their way’, he writes: ‘Free as I was to stand and stare, the exposed stone seemed to catch me up out ...”

“... standard-issue purple balaclava and a banana taped to his hairy stomach. He stands in front of the white wall of an art gallery; a label to his left reads ‘The Impossible Dream of a Pubic Fruit’ and an audience looks up at his giant grey legs. The image is one of five thousand that make up the digital artist Beeple’s collage Everydays: The First 5000 ...”

“... its time (apart from a Native American cop/tracker and a Chinese femme fatale, the town was wholly white), and Laura’s and the killer’s multiple identities clearly had some imaginative traffic with the 1980s recovered-memory movement. Still, almost from the moment of its cancellation the show sidestepped datedness by becoming an object of nostalgia, thanks ...”