“... This was widely understood to be a solemn and significant national event, but when Howard rose to speak, he wagged a finger at the audience and hectored them on the virtues of his amendments to the Native Title Act. A number of black Australians rose and turned their backs. Meanwhile, the long-running enquiry into ...”

“... to play them. From this small start, a Bohemian school of horn-playing burgeoned. As Sporck rose in the world, he advanced the cause of music in Bohemia, importing an opera company from Vienna and building up a horn ensemble of legendary powers. Bohemian players became so skilful that they travelled to France, not to learn, but to play. German makers ...”

“... little rooms with a sink and a toilet’ in the words of the South African journalist Mark Gevisser in his memoir Lost and Found in Johannesburg.2 No shared walls between white master and black servant, above all no shared ablution facilities across racial lines, which suggests that, for apartheid, it is above all the races’ body fluids and ...”

“... her introduction as an urbane, amusing character. This new translation by Gina Greco and Christine Rose is the first to appear in English of the whole text. The editors have spent years on their translation, tracking down the names of animals, foods, plants, agricultural implements, kitchen gadgets and medicines, and have judged the register ...”

“... a ballad called ‘Out of the East’ we learn that the sun in those parts shone ‘as the blood rose on the day’: And it shone on the work of the warrior wind And it shone on the heart And it shone on the soul And they called the sun – Dismay. The poem ends with the same information, now doubly delivered: And they called the sun Dismay, my ...”

“... someone who understands that public speaking is an art involving precise preparation: ‘I used to mark up the text with my own special code, noting pauses, stress and where to have my voice rise or fall.’ There are the clothes: that ability constantly to re-invent her appearance which being female allowed her. Though being a woman and middle-aged also meant ...”

“... Our relatives were more likely to be an embarrassment, not a recommendation. The query with which Mark Boxer, usually lying on the floor, was later to unnerve insecure talents seeking work from the Sunday Times – ‘Tell me who you know’ – was meaningless to us in the Fifties. We had to manage with a landlady and barman as references. No wonder those of ...”

“... Dickens as he did. Long out of print, his life is now reissued by Cambridge University Press to mark Dickens’s bicentenary. John Sutherland has added them up: there have now been at least 90 biographies. Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens comes just two years after Michael Slater’s excellent Charles Dickens, the first to benefit from the complete ...”

“... diagrams, for example, of how a horse’s legs move in different gaits and shows how a sweeping mark with the broad side of a piece of chalk can at the same time represent the shape of a muscle and the gloss on a coat – the first seven pages of illustrations are given over to children’s drawings. There is one he did himself at eight-and-a-half of a cart ...”

“... she has herself become part of the story. Her joint biography of Charles and Diana, published to mark their tenth wedding anniversary in 1991, presented a positive picture of a marriage that might not be a love match but was nevertheless a team effort. They were both furious. Diana’s response was to talk to Andrew Morton, whose book, Diana, Her True ...”

“... Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (the men’s counterpart) rose from forty thousand to over three hundred thousand. In the Thirties, the ILGWU established ‘joint liability’ in the industry, making manufacturers responsible for the practices of their contractors, and wages and unionisation ...”

“... in French, wang-wang in Chinese. They utter seemingly any monosyllable at all, but imprint the mark of dogdom by always uttering it twice.) Language spoken and overheard can yield complex wonders. This is from the BBC’s Gardeners’ Question Time: ‘When you tie a standard rose and this applies to any standard ...”

“... small men have to be assertive and ambitious if they are to be taken seriously, and Barrie rose to the challenge with fanatical energy. Idleness was not part of the attraction of youth for him. He never stopped working, and he saw through that side of his nature too: ‘There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the ...”

“... unable to sleep the previous night. Broken and disrupted sleep could be a symptom of illness or a mark of being ill at ease: Thomas Bentley, of Turvey in Bedfordshire, consulted the astrologer because he found himself ‘Troubled in his sleepe with dreaming of Children’. To draw the curtains around a bed and prop one’s body against a bolster was to court ...”

“... experience, and which is still used, as it was by Lennon in his work as an artist.In John Lennon, Mark Chapman was to perceive his double. Chapman was a former LSD tripper, programmatically married to a Japanese, capable of signing himself John Lennon and then of harshly revoking the signature: with a face as round as a lens of his hero’s granny glasses, in ...”