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“... of South Wales and Northern Ireland will exist in a parallel economic universe to London. What do they want, these Brexiteers? The fantasies of hardliners such as Liam Fox, Daniel Hannan and Jacob Rees-Mogg are based on dimly learned lessons from British history. The mantra of ‘Global Britain’ resurrects an ideal of laissez-faire from the era of ...”

“... producer. The existence of multiskilled all-rounders was an important element in the esprit de corps of a corporation that inspired and relied on loyalty. My father turned down ITV’s blandishments partly because his father had worked in the BBC before him (my grandfather Percy created the Midlands region of the BBC five days after the company was ...”

“... outsider to have a say in that was not altogether popular. When Tooley stepped down in 1988 he’d been with the House since 1955, first as assistant to David Webster, the Liverpool department-store manager who’d built it up from its wartime use as a dance-...”

“... said: ‘Well, I’ll leave you girls to get on with it. I’ll be in my study. I have work to do.’ We all know Arthur keeps his pornography collection in his study. I lit up a cigarette, gave my usual few coughs, and settled myself into the comfy leather chair. Pauline fetched an ashtray from the kitchen, impatiently put it on the arm of my chair and ...”

“... Now that Updike’s an elder statesman in the world of letters, an elfin figure pared down to a David Levine caricature of himself, a newer generation of detractors (replacing the ones that died off) has reserved him a room at the retirement home and seems irritated that he won’t take the hint. In recent interviews and articles he acknowledges the testy ...”

“... The ends​ of great fiction do not change, much,’ Zadie Smith wrote eight years ago in an essay about David Foster Wallace. ‘But the means do.’ She was between novels: three years had passed since her most traditional, On Beauty, was published; NW, her most experimental, wouldn’t appear for another four ...”

“... Do you forget things? I do, more and more. My ailing, failing memory was sorely tested the other day. ‘Do you remember who won the Grand National?’ I was asked. Of course I did. It was the most exciting race for years, won right at the post by ...”

“... time to prepare for [the black migration] is now,’ one unusually far-sighted policy-maker, David Cohn, wrote in 1947. ‘But since we as a nation rarely act until catastrophe is upon us, it is likely we shall muddle along until it is too late.’ By the late 1960s the catastrophe had happened. ‘Repeated visits to Hunt’s Point in the South ...”

“... on those very rare instances of dreams or horoscopes that appear to ‘come true’, as some must do under the law of averages, and to ignore the countless others which turn out to be groundless and are instantly forgotten. The Hot Hand, like astrology, is a fallacy, though there is some argument about whether or not it is an ‘adaptive’ fallacy, i.e. one ...”

“... Lewis Carroll. (The fact that the latter also represented the indisputable nadir in the career of David Bowie is, for the purposes of this review, neither here nor there.) In the film Dreamchild, the cinematic meditation on the life of the real Alice directed by Gavin Millar and scripted by Dennis Potter, Henson was the obvious choice to supply the puppets ...”

“... a different awareness of some of the issues. Whatever happens to ships or governments, countries do not sink. In his Britain and Argentina in the 19th Century, published in 1960, Professor H. S. Ferns gives this summary: ‘The dispute between Britain and Argentina concerning what one nation calls the Falkland Islands and the other Las Islas Malvinas is now ...”

“... as the guests were leaving the table for coffee, they spotted Rossellini, tiptoeing through the hall. He went straight to bed. Miss Bergman, desperate, tried to get him to come downstairs. ‘Tell them I didn’t come home,’ he suggested unhelpfully. She was left to return to the living-room to make impossible excuses, when suddenly the double doors were ...”

“... other little-known large paintings which were also probably made for the portego or large central hall of Venetian palaces. (In such paintings the lighting would correspond with that of the room: thus those on the wall to the left of the window overlooking the canal would be lit from the right, as is the case with the Bordone and the Schiavone.) In no earlier ...”

“... Trevelyan, then in another he is the thinking man’s Lord Mountbatten. No one can travel so much, do so much or write so much without attracting his detractors: the greater the achievement, the larger the target. Compared with his immediate contemporaries, Briggs’s writing lacks the combative forcefulness of G.R. Elton, the olympian grandeur of Owen ...”

“... After his dismal performance at the battle of Saintes in 1242, his bitterest enemy, Simon de Montfort, said to his face: ‘It would be a good thing if you were taken and shut away, as was done to Charles the Simple. There are houses with iron bars at Windsor that would be good for imprisoning you securely.’Henry was also affectionate by nature and ...”