“... coal mine at Longannet flooded and closed down for ever in March 2002, a man called George came home from the pit to find his telephone ringing. ‘Dinnae worry, big man, we’ll see you’re no stuck for work.’ This is a nation at home in hard, stony times. It will find its own way in the world. This is a cold, hard ...”

“... when he was out composing. Poets must also entrench themselves in sound and syntax, learn to be at home in rhythms, etymological echoes, idioms and vocabulary. This linguistic digging in can be quickened by listening to other tongues, yet it is almost unknown for a poet to settle in a language – as distinct from an accent – learned after childhood. Only a ...”

“... will be locked up in the hands of [the booksellers], the Tonsons and Lintots of the age,’ Lord Camden explained, ‘till the public become as much their slaves, as their own hackney compilers are.’ The power that the intellectual property regime gave to trade privileges, at the expense of royal privileges, seemed to degrade the nobility of ...”

“... Hansford Johnson – caught, to begin with, in the unselfconscious prose of her adolescent Boots Home diaries, 8” x 5”, a week to a spread – gives us privileged entry into the textures and flavours of a vanished time, the nuances of its class structure and language. You might have guessed that a girl in the 1920s and early 1930s could have ‘a topping ...”

“... On the campaign trail he played up his admiration for British values and backed the cause of Irish Home Rule, garnering the support of Irish MPs. Patel shows us how Naoroji painstakingly formed relationships with influential figures in the Liberal Party, including the ageing John Bright and the anticolonial poet Wilfrid Blunt. He forged links with women’s ...”

“... that comes from having had a glittering career at the forefront of tearful simplicity. ‘Good Lord,’ she says of AnnieLee, now singing for beers and fries at the Cat’s Paw Saloon, ‘that girl’s so gorgeous she could sing like a barn cat in heat and folks’ll be calling her the next Maria Callas.’AnnieLee goes back to her alter ego’s mansion in ...”

“... came: while Mac Donagh emphasised the sharp contrast between conditions in Kerry and in the Home Counties, he never lost sight of the fact that they were together part of a Hiberno-British world distinguished by its social and physical diversity rather than its homogeneity. Furthermore, throughout the first volume Mac Donagh demonstrated that ...”

“... be missing a lot of jokes. When Gordon speaks of other writers, ‘including he who was to become Lord Archer’, and a little later tells us that he was employed to teach Prince Andrew to write grammatically, I am at a loss. I feel there must be a joke in there somewhere. Of course it is a perfectly acceptable ploy for a writer to be deliberately silly but I ...”

“... of frenzied activity. The scene in Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade in which Lord Raglan and his party view the charge from a nearby hilltop is (perhaps deliberately) very like watching the making of a film. The terminology of film – ‘cut’, ‘shoot’, ‘action’, ‘reload’ – is the terminology of battle and it is a battle ...”

“... against the power of the towns and the fiscal authorities. It was not the squire but the second-home owner whom the peasants hated – one might say, especially if he worked for Whitehall. Sidelights on this story come from all directions. Ladurie notes that French customs of inheritance are almost wildly variable, but have been recorded in great detail in ...”

“... state. In those years they flew high over the more typical officers of British Intelligence at home and abroad, whose natural sympathies were right-wing, and who tended to side politically with Hitler and Mussolini rather than with anything which stank of Communism. Surprisingly quickly, after the war, the enemy changed. Suddenly Germany and Italy were ...”

“... with the notion of conquest by overwhelming foreign force one that came uncomfortably close to home. The armoured units began to take their oaths elsewhere, and over the following decades Yadin’s version of the Masada myth was picked apart. One difficulty was his interpretation of the archaeological remains. Even he didn’t insist that the potsherds ...”

“... Justice we are even given a ‘black smudge of pubic hair’ – but they still feel more at home grousing about the lower orders or condemning as racist the charge that the Metropolitan Police Force is institutionally racist. One might define fiction as the kind of writing in which it is impossible to tell the truth and very hard to make a mistake. If ...”

“... cigarette. ‘Officer, you got me. You’d better send me back to the UK. Deport me. I want to go home. By BA, preferably.’ They still had a smoking section. She’d hoped for better. She narrowed her eyes and gave me another mean look, then told me to wait while she left to make a phone call. Twenty minutes later she returned and grudgingly dismissed me ...”

“... which is that dark clouds were gathering, or, as he puts it, ‘bigger and darker birds had come home to roost by the turn of the decade – and with an ominously settled air as though, like the Tower ravens, they intended to stay with us longer than just overnight.’ In effect, back to the Thirties. It had to be so, if you think about it. The Thirties ...”