“... them as a threat to imperial unity until in 1922 a friend, the Irish nationalist politician Tim Healy, persuaded him to turn his papers in favour of a settlement and to support the negotiations that led to the establishment of the Irish Free State. Come to that, Beaverbrook was not particularly pro-English (Scots were a different matter). He felt no ...”

“... cover (a photo of a little boy), a bestseller a second time over. ‘Morante’s subject​ ,’ Tim Parks wrote in PN Review in the 1980s, ‘is the fairly common one of the child, every child, who grows up, grows away from the beauties and innocence of infancy to the complications and very often horrors of adult life, of consciousness, of history.’ That ...”

“... now with its original US title (at least on the cover; the subtitle did not appear on the title page). In 2001 a slightly corrected version was published under the same full title, edited by Fred Block, and this is the version that now appears as a Penguin Modern Classic.But the title is vexed, or at least vexing, in a more substantive way, too. Many ...”

“... Parliament, where I marvel most at how fluently she turns the (vellum) pages of her text, the next page always fingered and ready for turning when she comes to the end of the one she’s reading. I couldn’t do it.28 June. Someone writes to me reporting a signpost on the canal at Skipton which apparently reads ‘To Leed’s’.I suppose Hawe’s could follow ...”

“... millions which had made it possible to bid for House of Fraser. The DTI inspectors, in their 800-page report, describe all this with deadpan relish and then, item by item, ‘set out what we are satisfied is the story of their origins and background’ – the true story, that’s to say. Ali Fayed, al-Fayed’s father, we learn, was not a shipping magnate ...”

“... it sit in their bank earning interest. Take a look at the balance sheet, however, and at the page after page of corporate reports and footnotes which accompany it, and it’s a different story. High levels of deposits mean high levels of liabilities; and high levels of liabilities oblige a bank to have high levels of ...”

“... ho, hus, hum (1886); his-her, him-her (1886); id, ids (1887); ir, iro, im (1888); te, tes, tim (1888); ze, zis, zim (1888); de, der, dem (1888); ons (1889); ith, iths (1890); hor, hors, horself (1890); zie (1890); ha, har (1891); shee (1894); hesher, hiser, himer (1894); sit, sis, sim (1895); hoo (1895); ta, tas, tan (1896); mun (1901); hier ...”

“... Moore’s compass as a historian. He ends his account by quoting Thatcher’s private secretary Tim Flesher: ‘No other British prime minister would have won the Falklands War or the miners’ strike. She showed unique resolution and clarity. She was terrifically inspiring. If she hadn’t won, we’d be like Greece.’ This is partisan bluster. If she ...”

“... by those in charge, and the paucity of personal material about those who suffered. You can read page after page about the Famine and never come across the name of anyone who died or anything about them. In The Famine Decade: Contemporary Accounts 1841-51, you find the following, dated 19 April 1848:The Rev. Mr Henry ...”

“... is Conrad’s and the book a paean to his own ingenuity. All, here, is gimcrack-gimmickry, every page a shower of aperçus falling brightly to the floor, and you hear the clink and shudder as the critic passes a handkerchief over the vanished gleam. He would take a snapshot of each paragraph and write beneath it: ‘I have forgotten more about Orson Welles ...”

“... such as Italy v. Brazil in 1982, about whose intersecting characters Piero Trellini wrote a 500-page book, La Partita. Many have even generated their own nickname: the Maracanazo (Brazil’s catastrophic defeat at home in 1950 to Uruguay in the Maracanã stadium); the Battle of Bern (the notorious 1954 quarter-final between Hungary and Brazil, with three ...”

“... prime mover behind the plan’, and is represented as a dinky icon in a blue jumper in two full-page sociometric diagrams that supposedly represent his relationships with others involved: teachers, governors, schools, mosques, Muslim charities and so on. Alam says there was no plot, and that the letter describing it was a malicious fake. It is true that ...”

“... and North Wales Electricity Board, renamed Manweb. Littlechild said he had tried to persuade Tim Eggar, energy minister at the time, to intervene. Instead of worrying about the power over customers the takeover would give the Scottish firm, Eggar said he wanted to give Manweb ‘a kick in the pants’. Both companies now belong to Iberdrola of Spain. It ...”

“... anyhow, and it might be risky to pry: what is at best a ‘benign literary parasitism’, to quote Tim Parks, could ruin a good novel or poem for ever. It’s not just a question of revelation, of sordid details. I never thought about the reasons I didn’t read biographies, I just didn’t, and now I see that I distrusted them (and still do), that I thought ...”

“... Anyone living in metropolitan London is living that life around the clock.‘I didn’t cry when Tim died,’ Moore wrote: To be honest, I was relieved. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t hold his own cigarette. He could barely hold his own water. He knew I was there and he became flustered by my silence. But what can you say about your own life to someone on ...”