“... to the Conference were besieging Abacha even before he finished stating the terms – in the hope of a juicy government contract that would make them millionaires. This is to say nothing of those – like Kingibe, the Chief’s running mate – who didn’t need to be asked twice before agreeing to join the Conference, thus enabling Abacha to maintain ...”

“... is very uncertain when it will be disengaged. My Family send their best Respects to You.   I hope Sir your little Son is quite well.          From yours Respectfully                    S Walker A Scottish drunkard called Bell, who was involved in the divorce proceedings, told Mrs Hazlitt that ‘he had seen some ...”

“... liberation. Her college, St Hugh’s, was, in the words of her friend Ann Pasternak Slater, ‘a warren of nervous adolescent virgins and a few sexually liberated sophisticates’ with ‘an atmosphere airless and prickly as a hot railway compartment … Being laid back about being laid was de rigueur.’ Suu, as she was known, wore tight white jeans, made a ...”

“... But against whom exactly? Born in 1899 into an old and genteel New York family – her father was Warren McVeigh, editor of the New York Sun, and her mother one of the Phelpses of Long Island – Hutchins was orphaned at an early age and raised by a grandfather and a wealthy aunt. Like the skittish Victorine, she seems to have been lonely and fantastical from ...”

“... to believe in this way. In a dream she recounts in the journals, Plath describes her brother, Warren, ‘discovering me about to bed with someone whose name was Partisan Review’. You may believe these institutions create your ambition; they do not. It is inherent, or inborn, or created in you by adversities, luck, love or the lack of it. The real ...”

“... ratify. Then Bush spoke. In the light of day, or even of simple accountancy, Kyoto never had the hope of a snowflake in the Carboniferous, especially in Washington. By proposing what Victor calls an ‘imaginary emission trading system’, Kyoto created a new form of property – emission permits – worth over $2 trillion, but specified no mechanism for ...”

“... gangrenous leg: the result of undiagnosed diabetes. Aurelia moved Sylvia and her younger brother, Warren, to Wellesley, Massachusetts, so that her parents could help while she went out to work. At 13, Plath wrote to her mother from summer camp nearly every day. Always prone to losing weight, she reassured Aurelia by listing everything she ate (‘Two bowls of ...”

“... notice – Saucy Harry and his moll will be at Chester to eat their Christmas dinner, when they hope Sarcer and the rest of the fraternity will meet them at the union – 14 Nov. 1865’; ‘Wild Scoty, the celebrated king of the cadgers, is in Newgate, in London, going to be hanged by the kneck till he is dead, this is a great fact – written by his ...”

“... to go into receivership – would be to simply ignore the question and keep going. You’d hope to be able to pay bills as they fell due, and hang on for grim life until your house price recovered. As we speak, hundreds of thousands of people across the UK – across the world – are doing precisely that. The same principles apply to company balance ...”

“... If the Family Records Centre allowed people to burrow back into the walled-off parts of their clan warren, it also gave them plenty of scope to invent the bigger thing for themselves in the form of an ethnic past. The mouths of larger tunnels beckoned, even in these certificates. Standing at the edge of a word like ‘farmer’ and peering over, I could feel ...”