“... much weight to the outlook of the gentrified classes, whether Guardian or Telegraph readers. They do indeed feel pushed aside by forces beyond their control, and long for the old decencies of Attlee and Churchill. But they have some compensation. A modernising society has to put the past in its place, and the best way of doing this is by romanticising it as a ...”

“... This may well be reasonable for domestic bowls and buckets. But Dark Age churchmen did not do business by ripping the ornaments off their books and shrines. At some stage in its journey to pagan graves, metalwork with these origins (and it includes what may well have been panels from the shrine of St Columba on Iona) simply must have been looted. In a ...”

“... the ‘Salt Pit’, a black site in Afghanistan. He told his American captors the same thing he’d told the Macedonians: he was an innocent man, a German citizen on vacation. He made a living selling cars. He had no connections to al-Qaida or any other jihadis. After el-Masri had spent 149 days in captivity, the CIA realised he was telling the truth. The man ...”

“... errors,’ Joyce wrote to Harriet Weaver at the beginning of November 1921. ‘Working as I do amid piles of notes at a table in an hotel I cannot possibly do this mechanical part with my wretched eye and a half. Are these to be perpetuated in future editions? I hope not.’ These words suggest something of the ...”

“... to history is one signal, or perhaps one aspect, of something more fundamental, something which D.F. McKenzie’s three lectures on bibliography and the sociology of texts call more clearly to our attention. In a series of initial, critical remarks on theory of bibliography, McKenzie suggests that ‘historical bibliography’ should now probably be placed ...”

“... builders and a crooked monk who died shouting ‘Take him, Satan!’ on a distant privy; Jocelin de Brakelonde’s contributions to the chronicle of his local abbey at Bury St Edmunds, which include an arrestingly delicate account of opening the tomb of the saint; and some crusader and chivalric histories. The secular Florentines that follow are illuminated ...”

“... We shall soon find out whether its citizens now wish that nation to become a state. I hope they do. It will not only open up new opportunities for their own country but will break up the atrophied, decaying British state and reduce its efficacy as a US vassal. Hence the appeals from Obama and Hillary Clinton to vote ‘No’, a sentiment Blair fully shares ...”

“... put in at any other port with what appeared to be a valid document. ‘All the pirates had to do was kill the crew and then go to another port, sell the ship or just get away,’ Farooq told me. He and the rest of the crew were terrified that the pirates would murder them as soon as the Wilby set sail. After midnight, Blyth and a crewman who spoke some ...”

“... writings that are now being tidied up, edited and steadily published (see for instance Colin Kidd’s review of two such posthumous volumes in the LRB of 22 May 2008). Sisman’s biography gives evidence that he felt this as a failure himself. Even Mrs Thatcher scolded him for weak book productivity. ‘On the stocks? On the stocks? A fat lot of good ...”