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“... and shows the government, the prime minister and the political elite generally in about as bad a light as possible. It was probably inevitable that the Home Office would eventually undo so many ambitions. Its structure is ‘dysfunctional’, as everyone has noted, and as a department it is almost impossible to organise effectively. But that is not its main ...”

“... Two, the son of the English actor Hugh Williams, schooled by Life and Eton, a youthful toiler for Alan Ross’s London Magazine, an erstwhile globetrotter and a lifelong London resident, seems as English as they come. (So English, in fact, that he will object that his mother is Australian.) He simply makes it a more interesting condition than others succeed ...”

“... vote of no confidence in 1979. Thus old British Labourism perished for ever, not in the light (as Dangerfield wrote about the last stand of the old House of Lords) but in the creepy twilight of a rotten compromise.Milne’s narrative makes me re-live my youth, because it demonstrates the fashion in which these events were imbricated and ...”

“... of dollars of loans they have received from the West. Another would merely note that ‘Arabian light’, the petroleum that sets the base price of all forms of energy throughout the world, is selling for $10.11 cents a barrel, the lowest it has been since the Great Depression of the Thirties, taking inflation into account. Prices of other commodities ...”

“... a Marseille play of 1775, where knowledge of French, learnt in Paris, provides new status. In this light, it is difficult to understand how Le Roy Ladurie can argue that ‘of the two great human passions ... love and ambition, Occitan literature concerned itself above all with the first.’ He himself demonstrates that the first, love, centres on the ...”

“... had little time left over for occasional pieces. Those that do exist are more interesting for the light they throw on already published work than for themselves. Living, for example, is noted for its frequent omission of the definite article (rather as Russians do when speaking English). In a Paris Review interview in 1958 Green explained that this was to ...”

“... necessity that beat insistently against the back of his throat. He fought it off and struggled to light a cigarette. Smoke caught in his windpipe and he had just time enough to push his way back through the crush ... before he gave way to the temptation that had stood by him since falling down the stairs, and emitted a belching roar over a middle-aged man ...”

“... Raymond answered: ‘Reserve replacement.’) The era of ‘easy oil’, when domestic deposits of light sweet crude all but leapt to the surface, was long past. The material problem – of discovering and extracting a resource that is hidden under miles of rock or ocean or both, often in a form that is not amenable to easy pumping or shipping – was ...”

“... professor at the University of Missouri a generation earlier. The response to ‘A Matter of Light’, as the draft was called, was not encouraging. ‘I may be totally wrong,’ Williams’s agent, Marie Rodell, wrote, ‘but I don’t see this as a novel with high potential sale. Its technique of almost unrelieved narrative is out of fashion, and its ...”

“... American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell). Everything-knowers are admired, though with qualifications: the ‘know-it-all’ is an ...”

“... the war (that included many Englishmen at the time, let alone now), heard about the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Lady with the Lamp tending wounded soldiers at Scutari. A belief has persisted that the war was more than usually senseless and inconsequential, but Figes rejects this, seeing it as a turning point in the history of Europe, of Russia and of ...”

“... at outrageous human cost to both black and white. In a superb chapter, ‘Towards Australia’, Alan Frost argues that the Aborigines were dispossessed, the convicts exiled and exploited, so that Britain might have a far-south strategic base which could also serve as an off-shore gaol, conveniently remote. Whatever fine words were spoken at the initial ...”

“... some of his other music of that time, and the drastic new dating (mainly the result of research by Alan Tyson) is likely to come as a surprise to many readers of this book. Another – and much better known – work on which Landon throws fresh chronological light is the last piano concerto, K.595. Mozart entered it in his ...”

“... and refraction which makes it easy for us to grasp the relation between objects and rays of light, retinal images, photographs and even draughtsmen’s versions of what is seen, was no longer relevant. In all sorts of situations the expression ‘I see’ – the end of the argument when photographic evidence is produced – must be replaced by ‘tell ...”

“... and the self-mocking undertone of many of the most brilliant metaphors make Barnes more like Alan Bennett than he is like Martin Amis or Ian McEwan. Indeed, on page 71 of England, England the following serio-ludicro simile suddenly unfurls: It’s like looking for the tag to unwrap a CD. You know that feeling? There’s a coloured strip running all the ...”