“... almost any of the narrative accounts published during the 1950s and 1960s and familiar signposts mark the path to national fulfilment. Convict origins, free settlement, self-government, gold, wool, federation, war, depression, war, immigration, industrialisation, prosperity. Each stage of the journey leads inexorably towards a still-unattained destination, a ...”

“... remarkable ‘cowboys’, gung-ho for even the riskiest and most illegal operations. Stansfield Turner, Carter’s CIA chief, quickly discovered that his instructions to rein in on covert operations were simply being ignored. This led to a sweeping purge which was, however, put into full reverse within months of Reagan’s election. The old Nixon ...”

“... name for rape. (She quotes a po-faced reviewer who has actually discovered that in old Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth movies a woman is ‘coded for strong visual and erotic impact ... to connote to be looked at ness’.) Steiner’s point is, again, the sensible one that we can surrender to the spell of a work of art without surrendering our ...”

“... munitions going off. It therefore tried to shift the blame onto the Lusitania’s captain, William Turner, and also played up talk of a second torpedo. Both Ramsay and Preston are emphatic, however, that the U-20 fired only once, and they broadly agree on what could have caused a single torpedo to sink a 30,000-ton liner in 18 minutes. In 1903, Cunard had been ...”

“... seemed to me a small watercolour belonging to Tate Britain, entitled – usually with a question mark – Los and Orc. Identities, even if here the two names from Blake’s mythology seem to apply, are difficult. Let us agree to call Los the figure of imaginative and political energy in human history as Blake conceived it, and Orc that same energy taking ...”

“... to go back a century, that anyone in Britain was capable of responding to the achievement of Turner. This no doubt set limits on the painting that followed (the fact that Monet and others in France were capable is one clue to their painting culture’s strength), but it did not mean that the Pre-Raphaelites, to name his main inheritors, were in any sense ...”

“... Smiley went to an ‘unimpressive school’ and an ‘unimpressive Oxford college’, while Turner, the Yorkshire-accented interrogator in A Small Town in Germany (1968), is ‘a former fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, which takes all kinds of people’. All three men cast disabused eyes over the ruthless spy chiefs, priggish civil servants and ...”

“... hand. It is a baguette. Later, after the Germans have started bombing the British forces, Robbie Turner sees, across a field, the head of a fellow soldier, resting on the soil. McEwan doesn’t need to say what we are thinking, that he has been decapitated. As Robbie approaches, he sees that the soldier is not dead, but knee-deep in a grave he is digging for ...”

“... in 1930, when a 38-year-old professor of Anglo-Saxon and father of four small children sat down to mark some exam scripts. On a blank page he found himself writing this: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ This is still the first sentence of the children’s classic we know.He always said he had no idea where the sentence came from, or what a ...”

“... Baltimore, Tampa Bay). In the National League East, the ghastly Atlanta Braves (once owned by Ted Turner, now part of the AOL Time Warner empire) won their divisional title for a record 12th year in succession. By contrast, the 2003 post-season – the October sequence of play-offs between the best teams from the regular season that culminates in the World ...”

“... any other artist.’ And Julian Schnabel says: ‘Looking at Pollock’s paintings we think about mark making and energy and some kind of transference from the rhythm of the world to the gesture of your body, and how to capture something that is expressive and simultaneously seems like it’s not composed.’ Surely those remarks embody what really matters in ...”

“... Mr Gandhi, I won’t have any attacks on my Empire’ and he seems to have left no lasting mark on foreign policy; Of all his prime ministers, he liked MacDonald the best, which hardly inspires confidence in his political judgment. Most politicians, in fact, found George V very difficult to deal with. His obsessions with the trivia of courtly life ...”

“... scheme in Ealing was largely due to the availability of a garden shed in which to meet William Turner, who was supposed to be teaching her shorthand, but with whom she attempted to elope. After this the quest for a respectable husband became urgent. It settled on William King, later earl of Lovelace. The marriage was based on real affection and was a ...”

“... independence and British devolution.At the heart of Bucknell’s book is an examination of Francis Turner Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861), which Ezra Pound denounced three-quarters of a century later as a ‘stinking sugar teat’, but which sold very well from the outset and, as Bucknell points ...”

“... skewed, like some sweatshop version of Vivienne Westwood. There are jokey names (Page and Turner for a publisher, John Elton for an American literary agent with a disfiguring hair transplant) and passages of broad pastiche, such as this from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William towards ...”