“... 63 per cent of Conservative supporters would sacrifice the union with Scotland if that was the price of Brexit. ‘Precious’ the union clearly was not. So where are the passionate supporters of the union to be found? In Scotland, above all. There, a great many people believe that they have much to lose – economically, socially, patriotically – if ...”

“... more elusive epitaph. As his grave at Westminster Abbey was being covered, a passer-by, Sir Jack Young, noticed that the headstone was still blank. He ‘gave the fellow eighteeen pence’ to cut an inscription. It read simply: ‘O Rare Benn Jonson’. Like the portraitist, Jonson’s biographer has to achieve a kind of dual image. He has to convey ...”

“... It has been suggested that the ripper might be projecting onto horses the impulses that drove Jack the Ripper (or the Yorkshire Ripper) to rape women. But horses aren’t women – or are they? In the Indo-European world, the horse is a symbol of lawless animal passion. City children usually catch their first glimpse of the mating game when they see dogs ...”

“... couldn’t be the reason for the person’s fame – which eliminated such likely winners as Jack the Ripper and Ted Bundy. Nor could murder be seen as part of the famous person’s regular activities, his professional equipment, as it were. This let out people like Genghis Khan and Hitler – who were, in any case, only ‘arrested’ in the sense of ...”

“... is saved professionally by the vigorous intervention of his hitherto merely mystical wife. But the price of his assured future proves to be heavy: He will become a more disciplined academic, a more compliant husband, a more dutiful father, a more dependable person. He will even patch up his differences with the Dean ... Yes, it’s acceptance, and yes, it’s ...”

“... cried the restive Prince, “where can she be? and why this infidel delay when she cares not a jack about me” ’). A totally conscientious editor, Patricia Willis lets no sparrow fall to the ground. One is impressed by the sheer volume of the reviews, done over a very long period, as editor of the Dial, and after that for every sort of periodical up to ...”

“... a decisive revelation that never comes. In the end, we simply get two fascinating stories for the price of one. At its least persuasive, the book tells us that there was a man called Knox who lived through some momentous events, and a character called Crusoe who did much the same. Narrative tends to overwhelm interpretation: there is a good deal of blow by ...”

“... at the nondescript and wholly undefended villa from which Kenneth Bigley, Eugene Armstrong and Jack Hensley had just been kidnapped by ten masked men. Could they have taken seriously the line pumped out by the White House and Downing Street that the dangers of Iraq were being exaggerated by the media? They behaved as if they had. Some reports of their ...”

“... Bethnal Green via Spitalfields to Whitechapel, famous in its day for such do-badding criminals as Jack the Ripper, and for such do-gooding enterprises as Toynbee Hall. More precisely, White’s volume recovers the fabric of Jewish life among those immigrants who lived in one East End tenement block, while Samuel’s puts between hard covers the ordered ...”

“... are learned verbally. He can write (in numbers not words) any historical date he ever knew or the price he thinks you should pay for your house. But he cannot write a cheque because he cannot write the words for numbers. He finds it difficult to remember phone numbers because, like most people, he would do this by repeating the numbers to himself ...”

“... more than ten nothing unusual. In the wider scheme of things, unlimited fertility cheapened the price of labour and did the poor no favours. For the Smiths or Kellys, however, many hands, while never making light work, shared the load and generated multiple sources of petty income – one child an errand boy, one doing baby-minding, another selling firewood ...”

“... to have been an overwhelming passion, discovered in himself at the age of eight, when he broke the price code his father pencilled inside the covers of the books sold in his famous secondhand bookstore at 84 Charing Cross Road. A dozen years later, as if by pre-established harmony, the cryptographic needs of SOE gave him a perfect opportunity to exercise his ...”

“... 1998, amid rumours that his job was being lined up for one of New Labour’s rising stars such as Jack Straw or Peter Mandelson, Cook may indeed have been thinking hard about escape routes to the European Commission or the Scottish Parliament, but that doesn’t mean he was already a busted flush. He did, after all, survive another five years – and when he ...”

“... fund in London, buys up the whole of Coopers Chase – not for the purposes of asset-stripping or price-gouging but to safeguard the Garden of Eternal Rest. So all’s well that ends well.Given what it sets out to do, it’s hard to fault The Thursday Murder Club. It may be the literary equivalent of the ultra-processed snack foods that Chris can’t help ...”

“... was given an enhanced role in running the company when it restarted after the Second World War. As Jack Ewing says in Faster, Higher, Farther (2017), his eye-opening book about the company, ‘the Nazis had unwittingly laid the groundwork for one of the grandest experiments ever in worker-management co-operation.’This governing structure saw Volkswagen grow ...”