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“... When Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, is captured by the Germans in December 1944, he gets taken first to a POW camp near the Czech border. Most of the prisoners are Russian, but coralled in the middle of them are fifty British officers, ‘among the first English-speaking prisoners to be taken in the Second World War ...”

“... proclaimed. ‘Sun man gets “bomb” into Sandhurst.’ A very low-resolution picture, taken by the Sun man’s hidden camera, showed a bunch of cadets, the head of one of them ringed in red. This, apparently, is Prince Harry, though the quality of the image is so poor it could be anyone, and Clarence House has ...”

“... Announcing the winner of this year’s Samuel Johnson Prize, Andrew Marr was pleased to be able to say that none of the shortlisted books was the obvious result of a publisher’s ‘wheeze’, or the so-called biography of something which couldn’t in all honesty be said ever to have had a life ...”

“... against all things metric, the British Weights and Measures Association. There is apparently to be an appeal against the recent ruling that it is illegal to sell fresh food in imperial measures – good news for ‘Metric Martyr’ Steve Thoburn, the Sunderland market stall trader fined for selling his bananas in pounds and ounces. ‘I wake up at night in ...”

“... Becoming a British citizen is a significant life event,’ the former home secretary David Blunkett writes. ‘The government intends to make gaining British citizenship meaningful and celebratory rather than simply a bureaucratic process.’ The quote is not from Blunkett’s diaries but from the funniest book currently available in the English language, published by the Home Office, and called Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship ...”

“... On 22 November, judgment was handed down in a case brought against Macmillan and Danis Rose by the estate of James Joyce. Ulysses: A Reader’s Edition, edited by Rose, was published by Macmillan in 1997. Joyce died in 1941, and under the Copyright Act 1956 any of his work that appeared while he was alive passed out of copyright on 1 January 1992 ...”

“... is more to her than that. Her mother is the novelist Shena Mackay; her father was the art critic David Sylvester, though she thought of him as an ‘uncle’ until she was 21. She took life drawing classes at Morley College in the late 1980s, which brought her to the attention of Maggi Hambling. A garage belonging to Hambling served as her studio as she ...”

“... We acquire mementos: an Eiffel Tower cigarette lighter, a mug from Margate, Michelangelo’s David on a key-ring. All say, in one way or another: ‘I was there.’ It is not just airport art and souvenir-shop knick-knacks that commemorate time in foreign parts. Trophies brought home by Grand Tourists and modern travellers – bits of marble and views of Venice, archaeological finds, sculpture hacked from ancient monuments, exotic pots and textiles – all are mementos as well as art-loot and museum specimens ...”

“... a strong feeling that my body was dealing with something unfamiliar. I was lucky: it turned out to be the ‘mild to moderate’ version of Covid. But it wasn’t much fun. I had the semi-delirious sense that my body knew it was dealing with a new illness. I would feel OK and then not OK, in waves. The image that stuck in my mind that week was of being in a ...”

“... insanely cool new search engine, wanted to incorporate it as a company, and needed to find a name. David Vise, in his breezy book The Google Story, tells how they came up with one. A fellow graduate student suggested to Page and Brin that they use the name given to what is sometimes, erroneously or metaphorically, called the largest number, 10100: google. They ...”

“... two thousand people attacked the British Embassy. An IRA bomb exploded during the official opening by the Queen of the Sullom Voe oil terminal. Sitting in my college in Cambridge, I was thinking that perhaps the Provos were right after all, that the stupid inflexibility of ‘the Brits’, with their obsessive determination to remain in Ireland, was the source ...”

“... One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted – One need not be a House – The Brain has Corridors – surpassing Material Place – ‘All men say “What” to me,’ Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson. She certainly mystified Higginson ...”

“... I remember being struck in the late 1970s by the vigour of gay culture in the American marketplace. Two novels were selling strongly and being urgently discussed: one was lyrical and would-be Proustian (Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance); the other was bilious and aspired to satire (Larry Kramer’s Faggots ...”

“... looked over the Nile to the east and Gezira Sporting Club to the west. I learned to count to ten by timing the sunset each night, the sand in the air making the sun a scumbled, smouldering ball, dropping fast and heavily, as if overcome by its own heat. My father had gone ahead of us and been to the Mouski to buy Persian ...”

“... 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the IAEA’s agenda. The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israel’s side when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration protected it ...”