“... bloody and fruitless’, he said. The first two predictions, at least, were on the mark. British support for the South stemmed from complex sources: nationalistic rivalry, relief that the brash upstart was receiving his comeuppance, admiration for ‘Southern honour’ and other Confederate pretensions to aristocratic values. Many English ...”

“... Coventry Central Libraries after the fashion of the time) with my ex-schoolfellow Ginger Thompson ... This was my first experience of the addictive excitement a large open-access public library generates.’ When he jumped over the counter, as it were, things were rather different though father’s footsteps come into this too: it you can’t be a ...”

“... of the saving remnant on which the future of reading would depend. The photo on the cover of Denys Thompson’s The Leavises shows him in a jacket impermeable to the insults of time and with the open shirt of a Labour leader. He looks indeed, as his wife wrote of both of them, ‘grey-haired and worn down with battling for survival in a hostile ...”

“... 14 ‘enduring bases’, capable of housing 110,000 soldiers, and I heard Brigadier-General Mark Kimmitt call them ‘a blueprint for how we could operate in the Middle East’. I heard that the US was building what would be its largest embassy anywhere in the world. I heard that it would only be a matter of months before Starbucks and McDonald’s ...”

“... interactions with LaMDA, and the way they captivated him, reminded the technology journalist Clive Thompson of the 1990s craze for the Tamagotchi, the handheld device that behaves like a plaintive robot pet, endlessly demanding ‘food’ and ‘cleaning’, which its minder – anxious to please – can provide with the press of a button. The sociologist ...”

“... to attend Régis Debray’s trial in Camiri as part of an effort to save his life. All this left a mark. But it was at the Berlin congress organised in January 1968 by the SDS, the left-wing German students, that I began to feel the need to join some organisation. Rudi Dutschke was there, the Wolf brothers with Ulrike Meinhof skulking in the background and ...”

“... to provoke the attackers. To describe the assault as ‘mindless’ might not be so wide of the mark: it was vicious and random – typical, some would say, of an entire spectrum of violence intrinsic to modern Britain. Victim and assailants could have been typecast: Ford was blameless, a ‘promising’ lad; McCluskie and Reynolds were almost parodically ...”

“... is a neighbour of Paddy’s, Máirtín Maingín … All three men have now died … Carrying their mark – the height of my kin, their black hair – I share these bodies, our genes, a collective deep history.’Joyce’s father was born in 1907 in south Mayo. His grandfather doesn’t appear in the 1911 census: he was in Pittsburgh with his eldest ...”

“... else to cheer her. Dementia had robbed her of much of her acuity. Her relations with her children, Mark and Carol, were strained. She had little to do. Her husband, Denis, was dead, having succumbed to pancreatic cancer in 2003, aged 88. Their last years together were not especially happy. When he took a trip to South Africa for his health, as he had done ...”

“... often in soak on the draining board, fads as I thought even as a boy of ten, picked up from Miss Thompson, a herbalistic lady living in the Hallidays who used to give Dad burdock and suchlike ‘for his blood’. 21 February. On the 100th anniversary of his birth a lot of tosh being talked about Auden as poet of Cumbria. Auden couldn’t have inhabited his ...”

“... mid-Sixties I wrote a BBC TV series, Life in NW1, based on one such family, the Stringalongs, whom Mark Boxer then took over to people a cartoon strip in the Listener, and who kept cropping up in his drawings for the rest of his life. What made the social set-up funny was the disparity between the style in which the new arrivals found themselves able to live ...”

“... short of falling into the hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely acclaimed in life as she would be in the weeks and years after her death. The tributes were ...”

“... at large events in London and won support from celebrities, among them Rowan Williams, Emma Thompson, Grayson Perry, Noam Chomsky, David Byrne, David King (the former chief scientific adviser to the government) and Thunberg.Less well known is their following among lawyers, farmers (including livestock farmers), medics (last year the Lancet called for ...”

“... Sir John Sunderland, Roger Carr, Rick Braddock, Ellen Marram, Guy Elliott, Rosemary Thorne, David Thompson, Sanjiv Ahuja, Wolfgang Berndt, Lord Patten and Raymond Viault. Only Berndt replied (Chris Patten’s assistant told me he was in ‘rural Asia’ without email, then, when the deadline was extended, too ill to respond). Berndt told me he couldn’t ...”

“... portrait was the basis for a new painting (is it still right to say ‘of her’?) by J.H. Thompson, which is now the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Gaskell’s Life. What relationship does this woman bear to the original? Getty Images offers, with no disclaimer, a reproduction of a watercolour from the National Portrait Gallery that for some ...”