“... to be the focal point from Telford’s refuge, are invisible, except for the odd glimpse of white water; in summer nothing whatever can be seen. A plaque, unveiled in 1996 by the parliamentary under-secretary of state for Wales, and commemorating George Borrow’s enjoyment of what he described as ‘one of the wildest and most beautiful scenes ...”

“... my aunt brought Patrick to the London flat, our daughter Candy was already three months old.’ Peter Pan had the windows locked against him when he tried to go home and saw a new baby in his cot; at least they let Patrick in. But Johnnie was a journalist and six weeks after Patrick arrived, his paper sent him to Paris. ‘I went too but we left the ...”

“... days, having run away from the domestic constrictions of Portsmouth, she had worked as a clerk at Peter Jones, then in the firm’s furniture-painting studio, then as a secretary at the Medici Society, then for MGM as a reader. She used this period, the mid-1930s, as material for the best of her novels outside the trilogies, The Doves of Venus ...”

“... the Pole. Living things stretch their being across immense spaces, and huge energies of the self peter out in a friendly handshake with the cosmos: so the Snow-Shoe Hare meets the Moon and the White Bear embraces all the North. In Logue’s Homer, the touch of whimsy springs from an inability to take the heroic ...”

“... They were animated not so much by Voltaire’s regard for the modernising zeal of the heirs of Peter I, but by the belief that it was Russia’s very ‘barbarism’, its proximity to the despotic rule and military virtue of the nomadic Scythians described by Herodotus, that made it the perfect agent for the regeneration of Europe. In a continent already ...”

“... Australia’s most celebrated historian, Manning Clark, and its most celebrated writer, Patrick White. A new bitterness, of the kind that divided Britain over Suez and the United States over Vietnam, now split Australia. That Whitlam had greatly contributed to his own destruction by his indifference to economic reality – the oil price rise came soon after ...”

“... an attack on a German town the mayor of which was persuaded to organise a surrender. After the white flag went up an enemy tank opened fire, ‘so I shot the mayor and withdrew.’ Haines cites this as an example of the ruthlessness which enabled Max well to mention the incident ‘casually to his wife, without apparently wondering whether she might think ...”

“... devaluations and revaluations from time to time. According to Stephens, Thatcher, Major and Sir Peter Middleton (Treasury Permanent Secretary) all believed they could readjust the sterling rate if necessary. But by 1990 there had been no general realignments in the system for almost four years. The participants were increasingly focused on moving to a ...”

“... of spin’, have had much claim to democratic plausibility. One was Herbert Morrison, Peter Mandelson’s grandfather, now best remembered for the Festival of Britain. Well before then he ran the LCC in the Thirties, presiding over a coalition of trades-unionists and educated Hampstead women with Blairite discipline and Tammany-Hall ...”

“... knee breeks black silk stockings high heeled shoes with large buckles, blue coat, yellow vest white neck cloth with stiffner and frilled shirt – he is one of the Queen Ann folks’. The pretty brick so-called Queen Anne style of the 1870s which Thomson thus mocked was the architecture of a perplexed generation. Invented largely by ex-assistants of Sir ...”

“... that follows deal in Odysseus, the Minotaur, and Zeus creating the world from an egg (‘the white flew up to become the sky, the yolk descended into earth’). Also Princess Si Ling-chi, who, legend records, discovered silk when a cocoon fell into her teacup as she was sitting under a mulberry tree. She instructed her maid to take the loose end, which ...”

“... Doyle, who had never thought of Holmes as more than a sideline to his historical novels (like The White Company, now relegated to the children’s section of Amazon.com), pushed Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls. Twenty thousand people cancelled their subscriptions to the Strand. Its publisher, a marketing genius best known for a Railway Insurance Scheme ...”

“... of lame ducks. Sandy, his schizophrenic nephew; Patsy Healey, who had acted in his short film The White Bus and been depressed ever since. There was his mother and, for a while, his brother’s wife, and he was always on call to counsel and very often to subsidise needy friends and actors who had lost their way. I have had some credit because I gave room in ...”

“... to the present. The origins of the Russian dacha were aristocratic: in the early 18th century, Peter the Great gave his noble servitors plots of land on the road between St Petersburg and his new palace at Peterhof and required them to build (at their own expense) suitably impressive and well-landscaped country houses (hence the term dacha, meaning ...”

“... baby, she had grabbed without thinking a sexy red bra, now clearly visible under her businesslike white blouse. Trapped between the Muffia and the sexists at the office, Kate splurges on shoes, flirts dangerously with a client, and works, works, works – until finally her husband leaves and she has to, as they say, rethink her priorities. The fantasy element ...”