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“... and Screaming is admirably undecided on the matter of which epoch it prefers. Less useful is Tom Watt’s A Passion for the Game, which pokes about ‘behind the scenes’ of week-to-week league soccer, interrogating the game’s faceless servants, from club secretaries to groundsmen to tea-ladies. Watt says that ...”

“... In 1794 Robert Watt, an Edinburgh wine merchant, together with a few associates, was arrested for allegedly framing a plot to seize the Edinburgh post office, the banks and the castle, and to issue a demand that George III dismiss the government of William Pitt and make peace with the French Republic. Just before the arrests, an English medical student studying in Edinburgh, John Edmonds Stock, had been sent down to London by Watt with a letter to the London Corresponding Society inviting them to mount a similar insurrection ...”

“... in another admirable analysis which appeared just before the Framework Document, Kevin Boyle and Tom Hadden’s Northern Ireland: The Choice. The authors point out that any new agreement on governing Northern Ireland hinges on a choice between fully acknowledging this existing separation or trying to wish it away by administrative magic. Either the ...”

“... make Lough Foyle into Mannanen, the longest sea lough in Ireland, and turn Ernie McCleery into Sam Watt or the Bubble. Was it Rankin’s Hotel I mentioned? Not at all, it was the Dolmen Bar – named for the famous dolmen in Kilclooney, 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 ...”

“... Canning and Lords Eldon, Liverpool and Sidmouth. There were fellow poets such as Felicia Hemans, Tom Moore, Samuel Rogers, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey; artists of various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack ...”

“... Los Angeles it takes most of a week before your inner time-switch stops turning you on like a 100-watt light-bulb at two or three in the morning, and plunging you into darkness in mid-sentence over lunch. But it wasn’t the inner time-switch that woke us a few nights after our arrival. It was a scream – or rather, screaming. It went on at length. I’ve ...”

“... hearing ‘Mr Bleaney’, with its complaints about rented rooms (‘Bed, upright chair, sixty-watt bulb, no hook/Behind the door, no room for books or bags –/“I’ll take it.”’), on the radio in 1955, Monica tells him it sounded so very like you – yr catalogue of the room’s shortcomings! Like you & like me – I smiled at the radio as if I ...”

“... elicited from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and Henry IV Part One, Keats’s Odes and Tom Jones, Emma and Tess. It is still happening, even after we have got historians to stop drilling them in the battles we won, and when geographers no longer offer them maps in which the Empire is coloured red. Penguin Books’ reissue of Boris Ford’s Pelican ...”

“... boiling over with energy and excitement’. He reported, too, the scene when Jennings and Tom Harrisson met to discuss the formation of Mass-Observation: ‘He was at one end of the mantelpiece talking at the top of his voice, and Harrisson was at the other end, doing exactly the same thing.’ In 1934, Jennings, a young artist and intellectual about ...”

“... novel is modernist they usually mean that it is set in the early 20th century – like Tom McCarthy’s C – and contains one or more of the following: a narrative distancing which makes us work hard to assign thoughts, feelings and perceptions to particular characters; an unwillingness to present things directly; a commitment to what Ian ...”

“... of the end of his writing life abound: ‘Not a shadow of work apart from translating Watt. Perhaps it will come back. But unlikely.’ This comes from 1967: still to be written were Not I, That Time, Footfalls, Company, Rockaby, Ill Seen, Ill Said, Worstward Ho and much else, as well as numerous translations of his own earlier work. But ...”

“... was the wrong word: religious freedom should be permitted as a matter of course. Tom Paine thought the same.The Enlightenment placed heavy emphasis on the need to expand the reservoir of useful knowledge. The inspiration was Francis Bacon, whose The Advancement of Learning (1605) asserted that intellectual research should seek to identify the ...”

“... as a catalogue. Knight’s background had something in common with that of men like Wedgwood and Watt. He sprang from a Shropshire and Herefordshire family of ironmasters, and kept the vitality, the eye for detail and the eclectic curiosity of his fathers. A brother was a horticulturist; Knight’s own journals include jottings about odd facts in natural ...”

“... in which tier on tier of streets look out across the estuary to the mountains. Not only James Watt, but many painters, novelists and poets began here. After utter collapse, small citizens’ groups are trying to rub the old town back to life, to restore hope: a new theatre, the restoration of the huge ropeworks factory, a protest (why use cobbles imported ...”

“... heir. She was glamorous, famous and wilful. She was neon when the rest of the Firm was a fifteen-watt bulb. Peter Mandelson told Charles that he was reckoned ‘glum and dispirited’. If only the studbook had gone beyond genealogy and had recorded the malicious speculation, ruthless jockeying for favour and backstabbing that pervades the Palace.From the ...”