“... in a road accident; when he married again and acquired a stepson of whom he grew very fond, that young man joined the RAF in the Second World War and was killed in full view of his parents. He had told them that to celebrate gaining his pilot’s wings he would fly his Hurricane over their home. As he turned away it crashed into the hillside across the ...”

“... at Henley and John Outram’s Isle of Dogs pumping-house. It stretches to high technology in Michael Hopkins’s stand at Lord’s cricket ground and to eclectic neo-vernacular in Jeremy Dixon’s crow-stepped-gabled housing in Docklands. Among the targets for the Prince’s brickbats are London’s Royal Free Hospital, most new building in the City of ...”

“... of the British navvies, at work on the Rouen to Le Havre railway, is plain to an ardent young village curé. With their godless language and habits, their heathen names (Bristol Joe, Streaky Bill and Straight-up Nobby), and their service of the false god Industry, they must be emissaries of that devil’s army the Saint-Simonians. In the final ...”

“... a touch of blouson at the shoulder – seemed to proclaim their dumb servitude to the bejewelled young Directors who were even now filing into the West Stand. And just look at the West Stand – those glass-faced boxes in which, thanks to an urgent application to the local magistrates, ‘business parties’ could escape the Government’s post-Brussels ...”

“... still quiet – a far cry from its days as a fruit and flower nexus. I read in the Observer that Michael Caine’s father had worked in one of the London markets. Now the Market – like Caine – is gentrified, no stalls, shops or clientele operating much before 11 a.m. The figures, when we spread them out on our desk, are still below profitability, but ...”

“... by Retrographic: History’s Most Exciting Images Transformed into Living Colour, edited by Michael D. Carroll (Carpet Bombing Culture, £19.95) – is a marker of our level of estrangement. Take Marina Amaral’s brilliant rendering of a photograph of one of Ulysses S. Grant’s councils of war in 1864, the Union command seated on pews carried out into ...”

“... from analogue special effects, and it was fun to see him using it to address significant absences. Michael J. Anderson, the Little Man from Another Place, refused to appear after a quarrel about his fee, so his character was replaced by a screeching shrub. The character played by David Bowie, who died before he could shoot his scenes, now lived in a sort of ...”

“... urine was dark, her stools were loose, her back was visibly stiff, and she ignored her whimpering young son. She then sought out a little shrub, Vernonia amygdalina, the ‘bitter-leaf’ or ‘goat-killer’. Chausiki stripped away the highly toxic outer layers of its shoots. For twenty minutes she chewed and sucked the more mildly poisonous inner pith. The ...”

“... endorse this: ‘The books here on my shelves have countless examples of similar behaviour.’When Michael Ryan murdered 14 people in Hungerford in 1987 (and then killed himself), the idea was put about that he’d been motivated by watching Rambo videos. That someone could, apparently without motive, massacre strangers on the streets of a Berkshire town was ...”

“... kidnappers’ leaders. Another, one of two girls, has a gift for languages, and meets Hosokawa’s young polyglot translator in the china cupboard for romantic midnight reading lessons. If this all sounds too cosily implausible, it is, but to give Patchett the benefit of the doubt for a moment, perhaps it’s meant to be: she obviously didn’t set out to ...”

“... this last year discovered had become a distinguished molecular biologist at Edinburgh, but died young (in the 1990s) from Aids.17 January. Rupert returns from a walk with Owen, his brother, and son Freddy (five), worried because he had been unable to resist giving Freddy a kiss. Freddy is still at infants’ school. Had Rupert been vaccinated when I was, we ...”

“... leave Eton and retire to King’s, ‘where he entertained the undergraduates and helped dozens of young sailors, soldiers, errand boys and others down on their luck.’ The correspondence of Browning, preserved in the modern archive at King’s, shows rather a strong if vicarious preference for the Navy. His habit was to send off his ...”

“... were Lithuanian Jews who settled in the East End and made the familiar move to Hampstead; that the young Goodman’s environment, though far from rich, was civilised, offering good food, good music, much kindness and a tolerance of learning. (These Jewish origins, and a continuing fidelity to the culture, are important, though David Selbourne, as his title ...”

“... presence. From the mid-19th century until the 1940s, the nocturnal shuttlings of such groups of young men and women were known as ‘monkey runs’: their routes formed circles and triangles, with one sex on each side of the road and countless halts in shop doorways. Passers-by complained to the papers about jostling and rowdiness. But the Manchester ...”

“... and The Skull Beneath the Skin, in which the investigator’s role is filled by Cordelia Gray, the young proprietor of a London detective agency, and heroine of an earlier adventure, recounted in An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1971). Innocent Blood, like Barbara Vine’s A Dark-Adapted Eye, is centred on a bygone killing and its perpetrator (a woman sentenced ...”