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“... as the mastermind and frontman of a series of current affairs parodies, On the Hour (1991-92), The Day Today (1994) and Brass Eye (1997, 2001). These were notable for their meticulously detailed exaggerations of broadcasting conventions and their cheerful disdain for moral panics and media self-aggrandisement. Brass Eye was celebrated for hoaxing politicians ...”

“... There shall be a day when a shorthand citation like “McMaster 8:279” will be sufficient affidavit for the scholar of the authenticity and location of any quotation of Russell’s written word.’ With this ringing prophecy, William Ready, the General Editor of the McMaster University Library Press and the man who brought the Russell archives to McMaster in 1968, introduced a prospectus of The Collected Essays of Bertrand Russell in Russell, the journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives ...”

“... lost the mining industry and Ramsgate harbour, which was a big employer,’ the Labour councillor Barry Lewis says, lamenting the repeated blows to Margate over the past forty years. The hotel and tourism industries collapsed ‘when everybody started going abroad for their holidays’. The last big manufacturer in the area was the Pfizer plant near ...”

“... him. He won’t tell them his name or where he lives, and they put him up for the night. The next day he talks a little, tells them his name is Chiron and what his mother’s address is. They take him home. Several critics have suggested that at this point we are waiting for things to go seriously wrong. Juan will abuse the child or sell him. That’s what ...”

“... greyer than the version flourished in early snapshots – the cover of A Serial Biography, the Barry Flanagan etching from Act – but this is still the same mouth, the same disguise. The same bite. The lights are on and there is somebody at home. The speed of eye/ear/mind remains, absolutely, that of a particle accelerator. Heart is everything: the ...”

“... help of images projected on a screen and a ‘conductor’ who would lead them back to the present day (he never actually built the machine). This was a crucial moment in the development of cinema technology, as viewing shifted from individual peepshows to collective projections. Silent films were never silent, and Marcus writes interestingly about the mixture ...”

“... of speech or assembly. But even with civil rights, if you have to struggle to exhaustion every day just to meet your basic needs, freedom of speech or assembly becomes the kind of luxury you rarely get to enjoy. The view that choice is essential to collective welfare seems compelling, on account of the reasonable assumption that if some choice is good then ...”

“... finger down a page and stop. Open your eyes and read what’s written. I had just finished reading Barry McCrea’s first novel and – still slightly dazed and susceptible – asked: ‘What does The First Verse mean?’ I flipped through the pages of the first book that presented itself and found my finger pointing at the following ...”

“... dealings with ponces and other criminals. ‘It was nice to see him get whiter and thinner every day, more ferrety-eyed through lack of sleep ... To everyone’s surprise and to my delight, he kicked the bucket ... When I am feeling low, fortunately not very often, I think that if there is such a thing as everlasting hell-fire, I hope the rotten bastard is ...”

“... a place so small it’s hard to find on any map. ‘Would Kilclooney mean church field?’ I ask Barry as we sit in the bar in the heel of the day. ‘It would, Tomás,’ he says, then instantly produces etymologies and all sorts of words in Irish – way beyond the dozen I vaguely know, and can never pronounce ...”

“... On a typical day​ , John Henry Salter would rise to shoot wildfowl at dawn. A GP in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy for 65 years (he died in 1932, aged 91, while still working as the local doctor), he ministered to his patients in the morning, tended his dogs and plants in the afternoon, gave his evenings to committees, and seldom went to bed without completing his diary ...”

“... building, but to see the midget, General Tom Thumb, who was being shown downstairs. On the first day Haydon attracted only four visitors. ‘I would not have believed it of the English people,’ he wrote in his journal, with that absence of insight or humour that makes him such a sad, and at the same time such a tiresome figure. That summer there was a ...”

“... The day he first met Wyndham Lewis, shortly after the end of the First World War, Ernest Hemingway was teaching Ezra Pound how to box. The encounter took place in Paris, where Pound had a studio, and Lewis, impassive beneath his trademark wide black hat, seemed content to watch in silence. ‘Ezra had not been boxing very long and I was embarrassed at having him work in front of anyone he knew, and I tried to make him look as good as possible,’ Hemingway wrote ...”

“... in her mid-twenties, and dressed as if to sit for Ingres: fringed black satin on a yellow satin day bed; discreet jewellery; immaculate coiffure. But the face, of great beauty, is also of utter determination. Flaubert, a long-term friend, wrote that she had the grace of a panther. On this evidence, the ferocity of one too: there is something almost ...”

“... mother, Rochester had been an undergraduate at Wadham, the most advanced Oxford college of his day. He was settling accounts with the Puritanism of the 1650s in which he grew up, and indeed with Christianity. In the conversations with Rochester which Burnet records, the poet attacked the sacred character of the Bible. He thought that all came by ...”