“... the light – one can’t be sure. Down the corridor we can see the conductor – dressed like a bell-hop in an old comedy – brandishing a riding-crop. Out of the carriage window, crucifix and death camp chimney defile a distant hillside. Somehow the cushions of the seat have become a horse. The Jewish reader, absorbed, sprawling, elides with Rembrandt’s ...”

“... alumni of the Slade: Paul and John Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, William Roberts and David Bomberg. They were all influenced, directly or indirectly, by Fry’s Post-Impressionist exhibition of 1910, which introduced the British to Continental art, especially Cézanne, but they were able to develop their own work with an originality that weaker ...”

“... on the horizon.* Indeed, previous research on the topic revealed that, in company with Colonel David K.E. Bruce of the Office of Strategic Services, he was responsible in 1944 for ‘liberating’ the bar of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Master spies come in many guises, and the role of Dubonnet and gin in disabling the chief ideologies of the 20th century ...”

“... in boys’ adventure stories, that of a war hero, explorer and spy fluent in 27 languages. Charles Bell became a friend of the Dalai Lama and compiled the first Tibetan grammar and dictionary. He put the Tibetan case against British Everest expeditions, motivated by loyalty to Tibetan customs and doubts that British motives would be seen as anything other than ...”

“... was both intellectual and Communist – following similar books in memory of John Cornford, Julian Bell and David Haden-Guest, all killed in the Spanish Civil War. (The present title, Beyond the Frontier, nods towards Stansky and Abrahams’s 1966 Journey to the Frontier, a reworking of the lives of Cornford and ...”

“... Sunday night meetings on Bath Street in the city centre that Maclean began in late 1914 are Henry Bell’s nomination, in his biography of Maclean, for ‘the birthplace of Red Clydeside’.The city itself became a huge armaments factory: the Clyde Munitions Area. Most of the industrial unrest during the war took place in the engineering works: Beardmore’s ...”

“... ability to spot a possible candidate for the book while my mind wandered to other things. A little bell would go off in my head, and I would be jerked back from daydreams about the girl at the next desk. Very little of the material I waded through at that time made much permanent impression. But there is one thing which did stick firmly in my mind. It was the ...”

“... doorstopper – the ‘encyclopedic’ novel – which includes such celebrated behemoths as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) and Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997). Although mustering a meagre 482 pages to their 1079 and 827, The Last Samurai is vauntingly expansive in both form and ambition. As a subgenre, the encyclopedic novel develops ...”

“... property of historians rather than of the population at large. One of these academic devotees is David Hackett Fischer, the author of Albion’s Seed, a major and much-admired work dealing with the different British cultural streams that went into early American development. A professor at Brandeis University near Boston, he lives in the town of ...”

“... Slessor’s good works on the Upper Niger still earn her an image on Scottish banknotes, while David Livingstone became the world’s best-known Scotsman. They did not save many souls. After 50 years’ work in India, the missions could show only 3359 converts. But their influence on empire was deep and paradoxical, at once the advance guard of colonialism ...”

“... the letter to a number of acquaintances, some of them prominent, such as the jurist George Joseph Bell and the scientist Sir David Brewster, and some of them obscure. Close friends used to forgather with him at the house of Woodhall in the lea of the Pentland Hills, where the letter was written. The house was that of the ...”

“... Anyone who wants to leave their room for any reason must summon a maid, who then rings a ‘great bell’ heard all over the house, which is ‘the signal for everyone to keep in close quarters’. ‘The same formalities were observed on the arrival of new guests, and thus people could go in and come out without being seen by one another, though there was a ...”

“... contemporary novel, has been a mighty matter, looming large. Who will forget the narrator of The Bell Jar seeing an adult penis for the first time and being both fascinated and repelled? (‘The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.’) Or Fermina Daza, in a darkened room in García Márquez’s Love in ...”

“... the famous seizing of the handbell on the Conference podium: reciting Donne, he declared that the bell was tolling for the Labour Party and brought an audience of four thousand to their feet. (He was so pleased with the effect that he gave a repeat performance at Blackpool the following year.) Over time the image of Hogg and the ...”

“... gonna write a blues song for fighters. It’ll just be for slow guitar, soft trumpet and a bell.’ So said Sonny Liston in 1962, after he’d beaten his closest rival, Floyd Patterson, and become Heavyweight Champion of the World. Liston was not known for his sensitivity. Indeed, the facts of his life read like a blueprint for a Hollywood film of the ...”