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“... Glowacki’s novel makes trouble for itself. The work is translated – one of the two ways in which, notoriously, a British book can be guaranteed to lose money (the other sure thing is poetry). Give us this day was originally published in 1981, and was evidently completed before December and Jaruzelski’s imposition of martial law. Its saga of the uprising in the Gdansk Lenin shipyard ends with a cloudy optimism (‘It looks as if it’ll be all right after all’) which unforeseen events, not least the author’s subsequent exile, have sadly contradicted ...”

“... out the remains of the holy dead. Along the highways, in the branching underground halls and chambers, the dead began to stir. The Excavators, and others with special permission, hunted Christian bones. Particular signs – gravestones marked ‘M’, thought to stand for ‘Martyr’; palm fronds; and vials of reddish powder, identified as dried blood ...”

“... or ‘outraged’ or ‘mortified’ or ‘bewildered’ in the privacy of his own chambers with no one else about – and the most frequent subject of these psychological inventions is Chief Justice Warren Burger, who, the authors admit, refused to talk to them at all. Assassination by non-attribution is sordid, and the most unattractive ...”

“... in occupied Poland started on a considerable scale, even though there had been some use of gas-chambers before then. The Germans had constructed three camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka where Jews were to be killed by poison gas, and two others, at Majdanek and Auschwitz, where those who could not work would be gassed and where for those who could work ...”

“... half-jokingly in a letter to W.Morton Fullerton in 1902: ‘I would have written, if I could, like Anthony Hope and Marion Crawford.’ Public position, and an intense preoccupation with public opinion, are also the key to the one incident, in the life of this affectionate and (on the whole) generous man, that sticks in the gullet and seems definitely ugly: I ...”

“... cultural facts. Seeley in 1883 talks about England ‘expanding’ to reach its Victorian stature; Anthony Low, in 1983, of England ‘contracting’, in the second Elizabethan age, to become again a minor power on the flank of Europe. Popular sentiment and historical scholarship cling to this leavened loaf theory of a Celtic-Roman-German-Norse-Norman people ...”

“... point have seen early Cézannes – The Orgy, perhaps, or Achille Emperaire, or a Temptation of St Anthony – and thought about repeating them in the key of late Turner. But Delacroix was always the presiding genius. The Fall of the Rebel Angels in the show is a wild précis of Delacroix’s Apollo ceiling (with Brueghel in the background). Adam and Eve ...”

“... collections of manuscripts and rare books show us dark sights along with the charming, candlelit chambers where books were cherished and essays were written. They tell us, for instance, that the same East India Company paying Lamb to work as a clerk for 33 years and then rewarding his faithful service with a pension was pillaging India with its private ...”

“... in his partner a guiltless aristocratic libertinism extremely remote from the sexuality of Jessie Chambers or indeed Helen Corke. Burgess accepts Lawrence’s own valuation of Sons and Lovers as ‘a great novel’, and even allows to pass without further dispute the author’s statement that his story is the story of thousands of young Englishmen, and that ...”

“... side and liked to be called J or Jay.) Another character who fascinated him was Whitaker Chambers, the brilliant Communist agent who left the Party, became an influential writer on Time magazine and attained notoriety when he named Alger Hiss as a spy in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee. I recall him walking down the High Street ...”

“... to Samuel Bowles, the editor of the Springfield Republican (in which ‘Safe in their alabaster chambers’ was published anonymously under the title ‘The Sleeping’). Behold again the trinity of relics being staged for our contemplation: the pocket-envelope of Dickinson’s dress, in which her hand would rest; the discarded envelope, prepared carefully ...”

“... was one of the reasons behind Himmler’s decision to shift to stationary, purpose-built gas chambers. For several months Britain has been in the midst of a Holocaust revival. From the daily coverage of the Irving trial, to David Edgar’s dramatisation of Gitta Sereny’s Albert Speer at the National Theatre, to the newly opened gallery at the Imperial ...”

“... for all their scrupulous record-keeping, they left behind no photographs of death in the gas chambers of Birkenau or the gas trucks in Chelmno. They hid the evidence of the extermination even as it was taking place, weaving pine tree branches into the barbed wire of the camps as camouflage, using geese to drown out cries, and burning the bodies of those ...”

“... difficult, at least in the law, to bridge those last hundred-odd years. The senior clerk in the chambers where I was a pupil in the 1960s had started work towards 1890 as a boy in the Temple, where he had been trained to write copperplate with the steel-nibbed pen that he would still use to copy out pleadings and opinions for signature when the typist was ...”

“... de Caus at the Jacobean court encouraged the fashion for fancifully ornamented damp underground chambers that had been sweeping Italy since the 1560s. While the Stuarts and the Russells were commissioning elaborately theatrical grottoes at Greenwich Palace, Richmond Palace, Woburn Abbey and Somerset House, Shakespeare’s characters were still speaking only ...”