“... Britain on the opening night of the Hockney exhibition in early February. It inched forward, a few more guests at a time; at the back people craned their heads trying to work out the reason for the bottleneck – or gave up and went to get a drink in one of the galleries off the octagonal hall at the centre of the building. The explanation was Hockney ...”

“... A copy of the Koran?’ Setting off the alarm at the security check, I was searched much more thoroughly than I’d ever been before. The official had a good look at the soles of my shoes, to make sure that I wasn’t doing a Richard Reid, planning to detonate the semtex I was walking on at 35,000 feet. We had a meal as we waited for our flight to be ...”

“... literature was emancipated, and emancipated for ever, from the control of the government,’ Thomas Macaulay wrote in 1848. Macaulay knew very well that the Restoration licensing system was leaky and erratic in practice, and that it ended more by accident than design – or at least for reasons unrelated to freedom of ...”

“... an escape from his troubled homeland. By 1575 he was back in his native Belgium, a Catholic once more, now with a nagging Catholic wife on whom he was to blame his subsequent inconstancies. Four years later, when civil war presented fresh inconveniences, he moved north and adopted the Calvinism of his new home at Leiden. He stayed there for 15 ...”

“... of names and places are buzzing around: the 17th-century antiquarian was William Dugdale, not Thomas; the early Victorian author of The Mansions of England in the Olden Time was the artist Joseph Nash, not the architect John; the authority on Hadrian’s Wall is Robin Birley, not Robert; William III’s historiographer was ...”

“... to the craft of writing, he always wanted to disguise the vulgarities of effort, and nowhere more than in the comedies and farces of the 1730s, eight of which appear in this volume of Thomas Lockwood’s edition of Fielding’s drama. A third and final volume of plays is in preparation, and will complete the Wesleyan ...”

“... me to say this is envy. It is for you to say that this is envy.’ Gautier expressed the sentiment more gracefully, and not just because he did so in French: ‘Avis aux critiques. C’est un grand avantage de n’avoir rien fait, mais il ne faut pas en abuser.’ The only, feeble reply to which is: ‘What would you know, achiever?’ Anyway, whether or not ...”

“... The central staircase​ at Camden Town Hall is made of white marble from Carrara and is more lustrous than any marble staircase you’re likely to see in Rome. The building was designed for the Borough of St Pancras by Albert Thomas, a disciple of Lutyens, and opened in 1937 as St Pancras Town Hall ...”

“... brickmaker’s wife, who was made to pay a fine to avoid being ‘well whipped’. Marshfield was more fortunate than the quarrelsome midwife Margaret Jones, who had been hanged for witchcraft on Boston Common in June 1648, or the servant Mary Johnson, pregnant with an illegitimate child, who was condemned six months later, having confessed to ‘familiarity ...”

“... the size of sheep farms. Knowing Wales is a valid unit of area (equivalent to 20,770 km2) is much more useful than being prepared to rub noses north of the Arctic Circle. Here are some uses: the Amazon rainforest is being cleared at the rate of a Wales a year; the largest crater on the Moon is three times the size of Wales. When that piece of Antarctica came ...”

“... The paper was started in Madison, Wisconsin, in the late 1980s. It went online a decade later, and more recently its offices have relocated to New York. There were those who feared the metropolitanisation would blunt its edge: you can see for yourself whether or not this is true by visiting www.theonion.com (I can’t at the moment, thanks to the ever ...”

“... and ‘Robin’ were all used to characterise Walpole as an ambitious upstart, heading for a fall. More often, names were gutted or (as Henry Fielding put it) ‘emvowelled’, with dashes or asterisks replacing key letters or every character except the first. This technique had rich potential. It could cast a marketable aura of the clandestine over even quite ...”

“... he’s going to Cambridge. It’s an outrage. Never mind that Bristol would have known that it was more than likely Cambridge would make him an offer, and even more likely he’d take it up, so that whether thay made an offer or not was likely to be, for want of a better word, academic. Spoilt-bastard effrontery is immune to ...”