“... in the leafy suburbs, as well as the wide crescents and avenues in town, were coloured red or gold. Since many streets had a mix of classes, there was much crosshatching and playing with colour. Some streets were black at one end and pink at the other; blue and pink – ‘poverty and comfort mixed’ – were fused to produce a purply brown; a blue ...”

“... to be possess’d with double pomp, To guard a title that was rich before, To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet, To smoothe the ice, or add another hue Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish, Is wasteful and ridiculous excess. The last line could be a comment on the ...”

“... moment in the text. Like a medieval tomb, the judge’s crypt is embellished with ‘bright gold’ letters as inviolate as his body itself. Yet their language is dead beyond recall. Not a single cleric can decipher these ‘runish’ characters – an adjective that evokes the half-magical, pre-Roman script of England. The discovery of the corpse ...”

“... It is all as fascinating and remote as a traveller’s tale, and as hygienically distanced as Arthur Morrison’s Child of the Jago or the ‘Monster Doss House’ photographed for the first edition of Jack London’s People of the Abyss in 1903. But the news is that the Doss House is still there in Fieldgate Street, looking ripe to fall to the front-line ...”

“... wife watches him as she does her crochet. ‘The tiny flash of her steel hook and the hair-thin gold in his ear signalled in candlelight.’ Eventually, acting entirely on her own, the wife betrays him, one of her own people, to the police. The woman who keeps the shebeen spits in her face. The story leaves behind a faint doubt about the author’s ...”

“... designs of Dior, was only relatively easy to wear. The hem of the jacket was weighted with a gold chain, the sleeves ended above the wrist bone, the pleat of the skirt was off-centre, the silk blouse, tied at the neck with a bow, was enlivened with many necklaces and strings of baroque pearls. All these elements had to be kept in perfect play and none of ...”

“... it would look good against the black of her new carpet – and unpredictable. Newman’s father, Arthur Newman Senior, ran Newman-Stern, the leading sporting goods store in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb Newman describes as ‘lily white’. The pair met when Tress was working at a cinema in Cleveland. She had grown up Catholic in ...”

“... piling up on remainder tables, 1999 marked the appearance of Christopher Ricks’s successor to Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Oxford Book of English Verse, published a hundred years ago, revised in 1939, and followed in 1972 by Helen Gardner’s New Oxford Book; of the Longman Anthology of British Literature, a brashly devolutionary challenger to the Norton ...”

“... to change the contours of ancient Greek literature. Between 1896 and 1907, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt excavated the ancient rubbish dumps at Oxyrhynchos, in Upper Egypt; hundreds of lost literary texts emerged, together with unprecedented information about the people who read and eventually discarded them.* Authors who had been little more than ...”

“... a Cabinet Minister. Su T’ung-p’o wrote this in the first century AD (the translation is by Arthur Waley). There is indeed nothing new under the sun. Space on mountains, however, is limited, and, for ordinary Chinese people, there have been other ways of surviving the harsh and inevitable conflicts of life: feng shui remains one of them. The feng shui ...”

“... Bally slip-on snakeskin shoes decorated rather tastefully I’ve always thought, with a delicate gold chain and having the added advantage of slightly built-up heels’. He is, as who knows better than he, a blot on the landscape, an alien, a monstrous excrescence, Jacobsonian man. Redback is a novel of Australia and it will be some way into the narrative ...”

“... these fabled places lured Coronado north to the plains, where he found neither great cities nor gold, but a few Indian villages and a ‘lord’ wearing a copper medallion around his neck. This and similar disappointments did much to reduce Spanish enthusiasm for the systematic exploration and charting of the lands to the north and east of New ...”

“... it in loops and figure eights and diamonds. When he’s done, he shoves all his clothes and what gold he has on hand inside the bottomless bag, pulling it over his shoulder and grabbing his broom. The wind is cold, colder than it should be for this time of year, pouring through the open window, and he can feel his nose start to run. The wood of the ...”

“... with the boilerplate blandness of the three titles, which might have escaped from the pen of Sir Arthur Bryant and fail to convey the impish iconoclasm and acid acuity that are undimmed in this final volume. There are other works on the same theme, for example, Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976) and Ben Wilson’s lively ...”

“... and after the eighth century: Pirenne, for example, had a typical inter-war obsession with the Gold Standard, and decried the virtual disappearance of gold from Charlemagne’s Europe, whereas this third school rightly points out that the lively silver coinage which replaced it was a great deal more use in everyday ...”