“... on one cover and the reservoir dogs of the Labour front bench on the other. Uniform dark grey suits (no pinstripes), blue plastic helmets, heavy-duty wellies and – apart from John Prescott – full zip millennial grins. Showcased by a long-focus lens that tactfully blurs the background of industrial dereliction. Britain is Working. Handson ...”

“... Nussbaum? Her face, with the nose squashed in, the lips split, the eyes unmatched, the hair a grey frizz with missing clumps, is the first unassimilable icon that this trial produced. Hedda’s battered face stared out from the cover of Newsweek, from the Metropolitan section of the New York Times, from every TV channel. New York, ‘so familiar with the ...”

“... in the making, and already on the make. Hanif Kureishi found the perfect foil in the director Stephen Frears, who’s proved again and again, in films as different as Prick up your ears and Dangerous Liaisons, his talent for black comedy, and his eye for the perverse and grotesque, for characters who are both farcical and pathetic. Five years on, My ...”

“... first anniversary, he began to wonder, to his horror, about her eyes: Were they brown or black, or grey? Green? Christ, I can’t say ... One spring morning, something gave in him; shouldering his twin grief like a cross, he shut the front door, turned into the street and had walked just ten yards, when, from a dark close, he caught a flash of eyes. He ...”

“... Princess Margaret; Yes, he’s madly upper crust. In the minority were those impressed, such as Stephen Spender and William Plomer. Betjeman wrote to the latter thanking him. ‘Fuck Wain and the prig in the Times who was probably Griggers’ – Geoffrey Grigson, another in his rogues’ gallery. ‘I’ve gone away to escape further blows.’ His ...”

“... Mary’s arrival was indeed much more spectacular than Elizabeth’s: she replaced Queen Jane Grey; and because Queen Jane lost, we forget what an astonishing achievement that was. Jane had a good claim to the throne, not just because Edward VI had ordered that she should succeed him, but because her royal blood was convincing, as the granddaughter of a ...”

“... of eight or nine, I began to watch birds with some seriousness, I kept lists. The RSPB sold little grey notebooks with lists of British species, and I kept a life list of all the birds I had ever seen, and a list of birds seen in our suburban garden, and a list of birds seen each year. I’d taken out a subscription to a monthly magazine called Animals, and in ...”

“... a spy is arrested’ was set up in type but never printed: the Westminster’s editor, Stephen Spender’s uncle, was mildly pro-German in 1912, and he also turned down a piece called ‘In Fortified Germany’. But the third and fourth articles made it – Lawrence’s debut as a travel writer – and they already exhibit their author’s hedgehog ...”

“... A local taxi-driver remarks: ‘The past is one flat field of shit.’ The nightmare from which Stephen Dedalus, like Karl Marx, tried to awake has turned anal: history is a featureless faecal plain. It allows, as in Eastern Europe in 1989, only brief, doubtful moments of triumph and widespread public participation. The levelling of the past, the loss of a ...”

“... on the walls was a large picture, exquisitely painted by Spagnoletto,’ of the martyrdom of St Stephen. The Spanish school evoked the rack, the rapier, the ruff, the spiral ebony chair-leg and the fainting nun, and a world that was now sufficiently distant or in decline (in The Antiquary it is the invasion of Bonaparte, not the Jacobites, for which beacons ...”

“... cobbled and gabled ‘Tinkerbell Towne’, as Burra dubbed it, where memories of Henry James and Stephen Crane were fresh and sightings of Radclyffe Hall and her friend Una, Lady Troubridge, lent a touch of verisimilitude to the farcical Rye that, passed off as ‘Tilling’, was the abode of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia and ‘Quaint Irene’, the ...”

“... the cemetery in the small town of Predappio in Emilia-Romagna, Valentino brushed his dishevelled grey curls away from his face and wiped clean the white band at the bottom of his black trainers. It was 26 July, the Sunday before Mussolini’s birthday – one of three days in the year when neo-Fascists travel en masse to the place where Il Duce was born and ...”

“... and introduces us to the whole funky scene: the phosphorescent glow of the word-processor, the grey dhurrie, the Gujarati wall-hanging, the mementoes scattered about, the creative disorder of the desk ... Insisting that ‘not so much has changed in over four hundred years,’ Rybczynski whisks us off on a brisk historical tour designed to prove this ...”

“... would have told the family that.’ Newton was said to be artistic: two dusty little green-grey daubs – both of them Derbyshire landscapes – are among his surviving effects. There are two photographs of him in uniform – one from the beginning of the war, the other from the end. In the first he looks pale, spindly and rather stupid: a ...”

“... were known from the colour of their capes as ‘black friars’, as distinct from Franciscan ‘grey friars’ and Carmelite ‘white friars’. The monastery was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1538, whereupon its five-acre precinct became a prime piece of Tudor real estate. Chris Laoutaris’s Shakespeare and the Countess gives a remarkably detailed account of ...”