“... with the burgeoning folk romance of the bushranger, the colony’s own mythicised hybrid hero, a cross between a thuggish highwayman and Robin Hood. The bushranger, as a symbol of the idea of liberty and of the possibility of defiance against a harsh penal code, was eventually to settle into the more-or-less-actual ...”

“... some nice bits of furniture but the atmosphere (well-heeled retired couples, women in sharp little Robin Hood hats, men in Barbours) puts me off, and having driven fifty miles to get there, I spend ten minutes looking round, then beat a quick retreat. I drive back over upper Wharfedale to Kettlewell on a road that used to be deserted and scarcely ...”

“... to Eva’s own, vast funeral cortège, shot in Budapest in a sumptuous style which suggests a cross between early Eisenstein and late Cecil B. De Mille. There are fine pictures of this and many other scenes in The Making of ‘Evita’. The movie looks great in the book, and pretty good on the screen. Its looks are not its problem. The point of the ...”

“... I have come to recognise, even if I don’t easily accept, that borders are places of risk and we cross them at our peril. They are sacred, ‘set apart’, defined precisely by division, which is the reason we hold their defence to be sacrosanct. We teach ourselves the limits of our lives by beating the bounds, literally so, in the past; today, mostly ...”

“... for six years.These proposals and arguments came up against powerful social and political cross-currents. Patronage networks founded on kinship or friendship were deeply entrenched, complicating notions of public trust and blurring the boundaries between public and private. Opportunities to rise through examinations, or retire with pensions, were very ...”

“... her way in 1916 to the battlefields of France, where she drove an ambulance for the American Red Cross. Between runs to the trenches, she shared a flat in Montparnasse with several other girl-drivers, one of whom, Dolly Wilde, louche niece of Oscar and member of the expatriate lesbian circle around Natalie Barney, became an early and important love. Wilde ...”

“... reflex, the Agatha Christie cornerstone, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Or as Derek Raymond (Robin Cook) frequently proclaimed, paraphrasing Edmund Wilson: ‘who gives a fuck who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Raymond, attempting in The Hidden Files to define the ‘black novel’ in which he specialised, glossed the Jamesian school as ‘pretentious escapist ...”

“... mouth to defend against foreign incursions. To mark the occasion the Le Moyne brothers put up a cross and slaughtered a buffalo. Nearly twenty years passed before the French crown could be persuaded to build a city on the Mississippi. Bienville, by then governor of Louisiana, proposed building New Orleans along the natural levee near Bayou St John; he had ...”

“... the stream of an exhausted linear time that is about to peter out. Brilliantly tracking the criss-cross implosion of themes, Auerbach doesn’t quote more than she has to. One barrier, I think, to du Maurier’s recognition as a serious writer has been her indifference to the raw material of language. Editors at Gollancz had to rewrite for grammar and ...”

“... wrote, ‘for heaven’s sake keep clear of this town, unless you have an awful lot of money.’ Robin Redgrave was frantically trying to stave off bankruptcy and praying that Micheline’s lifelong friendship with Rica Antonescu, wife of the general-dictator, might afford the family some protection. At 11 p.m. on 9 February 1941, the telephone rang in their ...”

“... has a border with Romania and everybody is worried that the man on the radio is going to cross it with his Panzer tanks so he can continue eastwards to make one really big, joined-up ‘living space’. In Vienna, they say, many shops are displaying three maps showing what this will look like: the first map is titled ‘THE GERMANY WHICH WAS’, the ...”

“... uncle and nephew has been so contrived as to conceal the fact that the interlocutors speak at cross-purposes throughout. A single ‘he’ or ‘she’ would give the game away, but no single ‘he’ or ‘she’ is uttered. It is the husband and not the wife who is going mad and has been under Sir Alington West’s scrutiny at the dinner-party. And ...”

“... it had reached 50p and £1. To some extent he shaped his price to the customer, though not in a Robin Hood sort of way, the poorer customers often getting charged more, and any attempt to bargain having the same effect. I have two American clocks, both in working order, that were five shillings apiece and an early Mason’s Ironstone soup dish that cost ...”

“... only major public commission the Smithsons had to wait until the late 1960s, when they built the Robin Hood Gardens estate in Poplar, East London. An attempt to create Corbusian ‘streets in the sky’ and put their social theories into practice by force majeure, it had a certain conceptual dignity but was never a practical success. Soon after it was ...”

“... trail. Would Labour’s disaster of 5 May have happened if any of its best and brightest – Robin Cook, Douglas Alexander, Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown, even John Smith – had stayed in Scotland to lead the party and the devolved government at Holyrood? Only Donald Dewar took the train back north and became first minister of Scotland in 1999. It ...”