“... of his accent: he was obviously a coalminer’s son from a working-class background.’ That may sound archaic, but Neil, for all his new-technology expertise, seems to be a throwback to the class-bound England of his father’s generation, and perhaps the University of York and the boat club only helped to remind him of his lowly standing on the ...”

“... The human fly’s rucksack is stuffed, skew, sleeping bag dangling like a spare arm. He may well have been an early-rising, walk-to-work rambler, appreciative of the ruled shadow-lines of the trees, the suddenly voluptuous blossom season; a man like myself, determined to respect his regular route in denial of the padlocked park gates. Rough ...”

“... receiving this letter because your property or business is located within 200 metres of land that may be needed in the future to build the proposed Crossrail 2 underground rail line.’ We lived, so it appeared, in ‘an area of surface interest’. And if the shadow of the Crossrail pit blighted any potential property sale, we were free to make a claim for ...”

“... staff than for his Ukrainian opponents. Or is his frantic PR activity a symptom of weakness? He may nominally control a few guns and planes, but he depends on the military establishment for munitions. He relies on the Kremlin’s continuing desire for a menacing, off-the-books force to carry out deniable ops abroad and to offer its regular army the spur of ...”

“... living our lives.’An atmosphere of strain, a willed normality, pervaded everyday life. While it may have been ‘comforting to shop’, as Beck says, what was sold was also part of the story. Gun sales shot up, and so did sales of SUVs – people felt safer sitting up high. Time magazine, finger on the American pulse as always, noted the transformation of ...”

“... reproduces two registration cards from the Drancy camp. René Lévy, born in France on 27 May 1934, arrested as part of the ‘Allg. Massnahmen gegen Juden’ (‘general measures against Jews’) is released despite both his grandparents being Jewish, because his mother was an Aryan. His card is marked, in pencil, ‘Libéré’. Ten-month-old ...”

“... journalistic and writerly senses – which appeared in the Parisian broadsheet Le Matin between May and December 1906 (not, as McGuinness tells us, between 1903 and 1937). Twenty-eight are included in the Penguin anthology, the only instance of an author being represented by more than one item, although ‘author’ does not quite fit the ...”

“... A modern reader will not find in it the book they read ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. They may find themselves lingering over those background touches that now seem to weave the majority: and then the stillborn baby was the colour of TEA, and then the cross-dressing undercover agent’s breast MIGRATED, and then a guy got together with a Swiss hand ...”

“... brought them closer to it, redefining what was possible: the biomass of the continental grasslands may have been a thousand times greater than that of the region’s animals. The Comanches plugged themselves into a seemingly inexhaustible energy stream of grass, flesh, and sunlight.The Lakota, too, secured a vast hunting range, annexing swathes of the Northern ...”

“... fended for themselves. Walking down the Regent’s Canal from Victoria Park, on the morning of 8 May 2008, I witnessed another eviction. Around thirty police, with attendant vans. Bailiffs, hired muscle. Council officials in dark suits clutching upraised clipboards. Loud bangs, crunched hinges, and the door is battered down. A towpath cyclist is ...”

“... the Guardian lost some readers in the North but gained many more in London and the South, which may have played a part in its decision to drop Manchester from its title in 1959 and move its headquarters to London five years later.) The Observer didn’t lose readers; its pre-Suez peak sale of nearly 569,000 copies had increased to a weekly average of ...”

“... gave me an address. She lives in California.’ ‘You see,’ Mrs Trimble said, ‘she may be a carrier and not know.’ ‘She’s married.’ Mrs Trimble raised her hands. ‘Then she should inform her husband.’ ‘Maybe she got it from him.’ ‘Maybe.’ ‘I’ll bet there’s someone he, too, should inform.’ ‘It would be interesting to ...”

“... to Marseille to teach. Sartre proposed to her so that they wouldn’t have to be separated. ‘I may say that not for one moment was I tempted to fall in with his suggestions,’ Beauvoir writes in The Prime of Life, adding that ‘the task of preserving my independence was not particularly onerous; I would have regarded it as highly artificial to equate ...”

“... in the sanctuary of the lavatory, I endeavoured to remove their physical traces. I was born on 5 May 1923, in a London nursing home, which occupied a house in an early 19th-century square. The square, Torrington Square, was destroyed in the war. One side of it still stands as a terrace, but I do not know whether this includes the house where I was born, even ...”

“... Royal Mail. The bitter postal rumble between the Netherlands and Germany in the late Noughties may have had nothing to do with these figures, but it looked like the symptom of something rotten. When I say bitter, I mean bitter. TNT’s Almast Diedrich was courteous in the face of my rather cheeky questions about the company’s activities in Britain, but ...”