“... experienced climate change but that they may, in part, have caused it. The palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman has suggested that people started assaulting the ozone layer with greenhouse gases about eight thousand years ago, when farming began to replace hunting and gathering. Deforestation carried out by a growing population may have made the world ...”

“... courtyard. The entrance lobby’s cool, airy silence was a contrast to the intense heat and white light of the afternoon outside. I took the lift up and was let into the office, where I was shown into an empty room with a desk. I spoke with the first of the people who had been asked to come for interview. As with every compliance audit, on my list of ...”

“... writes, ‘since they, too, could now participate in forms of asset ownership once reserved for white married men and their families.’ Private financial instruments were being employed to perform a moral and political function they were ultimately ill-suited to perform. Then there is the creeping moral crisis of capitalism, now recognised even by many ...”

“... William Jefferson (‘Bill’) Clinton is not the man from Hope for nothing. And the major story in the American media this election year recounts his resurrection from the politically dead. Indeed, Clinton’s rise is matched in American history only by the equally spectacular fall of George (‘Desert Storm’) Bush, the collapse that put the Arkansas Governor in the White House in the first place ...”

“... surname, because his father has literally torn his page out of the family history. In The Woman in White (1859-60) – recently reprinted by Vintage without any notes or even Collins’s own prefaces – the uncanny resemblance of two women makes them vulnerable to identity theft, incarceration in a lunatic asylum, and poisoning. The heroine of No Name ...”

“... feathers in their hair, intent on a game of billiards. They are Africans. And here are twenty-odd white men, in straw boaters, surrounding a prone crocodile. Joblard, Sinclair’s friend, arranges the cards so that they tell a story. At once they become scrutable: they are images of imperialism. Joblard titles this picture story, what else, ‘Heart of ...”

“... as prolific; but we need some such terms if we are to begin to describe the extraordinary work of William Gaddis, born 1922, the author of The Recognitions (1955), JR (1975), Carpenter’s Gothic (1985) and now A Frolic of His Own. Everyone talks in these novels, all the time and at length. They don’t listen, or they barely listen; or they listen too ...”

“... the Endeavour in the late 1760s and Charles Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos in the 1830s. William and Caroline Herschel’s advances in astronomy and Humphry Davy’s in chemistry dominate both Holmes’s history and the period itself, but Holmes is interested too in John Herschel, William’s son, who nearly became ...”

“... The earliest published image of the Greek Revival building by William Wilkins which stretches across the north side of Trafalgar Square is an engraving that shows it under construction in 1836, with the dignity of its architecture masked (as it so often is today) by hoardings covered with noisy advertising. In front of them some violent encounters of the sort familiar to Mr Jingle and Oliver Twist are being enacted ...”

“... hadn’t been treated as a hate crime. Soon afterwards he decided to make a submission to Sir William Macpherson’s inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. It was this inquiry that led to the charge that there was ‘institutional racism’ in the Met. After Virdi’s reinstatement in 2000, he was unsurprisingly overlooked for promotion until ...”

“... One’s sense of Buchan the man, as derived from the excellent and engaging memoir by his son William, is of someone vastly enjoying life. How else could anyone have done so much and covered so much paper – more than a million words in Nelson’s History of the War alone? But then the consciousness of giving pleasure on such a scale (and it is no ...”

“... thus admitting into the discussion many more writers and performers, male and female, black and white. Feminisation proved very influential, even though its estimate of many 19th-century American female authors, suffering by comparison with the great men of the period, and especially Melville, was cooler than the fashion was soon to dictate. The main ...”

“... Finn black? Of course he wasn’t. By today’s accredited categories he was poor, male, white trash. So what – besides a desire to be arresting – lies behind Professor Fishkin’s clearly tendentious title? Mark Twain, Clifton Fadiman wrote, is ‘our Chaucer, our Homer, our Dante, our Virgil, because Huckleberry Finn is the nearest thing we ...”

“... if more of those whom I saw eating and sunning themselves had been young and bronzed, not old and white-haired, and if the pavilion was not still surrounded by the brick terraces you see in the earliest photographs, you would have guessed that the planner’s dream had been achieved. Overy quotes Earl De La Warr, the socialist mayor of Bexhill who promoted ...”

“... inscribed ‘this is a token.’ The hospital was in a sense Britain’s first public art gallery. William Hogarth was among the founders: he fostered children, designed their uniforms and a coat of arms for the hospital, and solicited donations of work from other artists. The museum contains paintings by Reynolds and Gainsborough as well as Hogarth ...”