“... might have tossed back into critical oblivion with barely a second glance: the courtier MP William Collier and the theatrical impresario Christopher Rich, for instance, whose battle for control of Drury Lane Hill briefly blundered into in 1711; or the women writers such as Eliza Haywood and Martha Fowke, alias ‘Clio’, who were part of the literary ...”

“... If you’re going to steal other people’s ideologies, steal big. By flinging fistfuls of cash at Ulster busmakers to produce empty space (the key difference between the Routemaster and other buses is that one corner is cut away to make an open-air platform at the back, enabling passengers – if they’re able-bodied and unencumbered by children ...”

“... British welfare state. Instead Renwick tops and tails his book with the well-known figure of Sir William Beveridge, opening with a vignette of the great social reformer going to the Commons on 16 February 1943 to listen to the debate on his plan for comprehensive social insurance, and closing on 5 July 1948, the ‘appointed day’ on which the Labour ...”

“... glimpse a flickering hope of better times to come. Indeed the novel sight and smell of substantial cash-flow from the work of living composers has intoxicated some of the captains of the music industry. Even as orders for ‘the next Górecki’ were heard in the boardrooms, the ever-striking figure of John Tavener emerged once again from his meditations, and ...”

“... that life has to offer in its most inaccessible tentacles ... For ... each moment has its cash value, and it is that cash value we must insist upon particularly when it is at once pleasant and not too expensive.’ The Shakespearean echo and the parody of Pater hardly make the performance less pretentious. The ...”

“... each communist fighter kidnapped along the Ho Chi Minh trail, proxy paramilitaries were given ‘cash on delivery’, a 2009 memoir by the CIA agent Thomas Leo Briggs claimed. SOG officers were also involved in provoking clashes in the Gulf of Tonkin between US and North Vietnamese forces, leading to the eponymous resolution that resulted in Indochina being ...”

“... the Loch Ness monster being found are a bizarrely low 500 to 1. (Another 5000 to 1 bet offered by William Hill is that Barack Obama will play cricket for England. I’d advise against that punt.) Nonetheless, 5000 to 1 pales in comparison with the odds you would have got in 2008 on a future world in which Donald Trump was president, Theresa May was prime ...”

“... The painters have paid too much attention to the ism and not enough to the painting,’ William Carlos Williams wrote in 1928. Something similar could be said about Williams’s own critics: since his death in 1963, attention to his theories and to his life has been getting in the way of his poems. With Williams, more than the usual number of isms and caricatures need to be cleared away ...”

“... she is able to sustain our interest in their dramas, pleasures, quarrels and sorrows long after ‘William’ (as Barker always calls him – even, irritatingly, ‘our William’) has ceased to write wonderful poetry. In fact, she manages to make an intriguing sub-narrative out of his wife’s and his sister’s ...”

“... social yield – manors, farms, pictures and so on – and then leveraging them at Lloyd’s for cash would have seemed to Bates foolish, which it is; but to treat this highly speculative investment as if it were gilt-edged, as if it were ‘the sweet simplicity of the 3 per cents’, is beyond foolish. But I guess the English were always gamblers. The third ...”

“... output of two generations of Heaton Coopers is dealt with, Alfred (d.1929) and the much reproduced William (d.1995). There is no mention of Julian, whose very large paintings of reft and ice-armoured mountain faces are masterly images of the Earth’s crust. On climbing, which Ruskin girned at for treating the hills ‘as soaped poles in a bear ...”

“... intrepid sorts went to Dubrovnik and stayed in designated hotels, but that was all. So my father, William Woods, decided we should go. He was struggling to finish his novel Manuela (later made into a film, with Trevor Howard in the lead), and we were very short of cash. I suspect that he was also being pressed by several ...”

“... At the more virile end of the spectrum were the little-known poets Alexander Rodger and William Thom. In ‘Whisperings for the Unwashed’, Thom is vigorously political, while the radical Rodger opens his satire on savings banks with this: Ho! ye worthless, thriftless trash; Worthless, because ye haenae ...”

“... little foreign imports and works of art like the Lamborghini. It was not so unrealistic. Sir William Lyons founded the Jaguar car company on such a dream in the Thirties and the dream survived both World War Two and the increasingly sporty performance of the staid family saloon. Hard-nosed American dealers were prepared to pay $25,000 for a DeLorean ...”

“... with such a sum unassisted. But there is, apparently, every likelihood that the HLF – rolling in cash – will pitch in. According to newspaper reports, Murray is prepared to lower the price (to £33.2m) for their purchaser of first choice. According to the same reports, the HLF is likely, at least, to offer a ‘challenge’ 50 per cent, if the rest can be ...”