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“... from the streets where fans-turned-players like Martin Peters, the future World Cup winner, and Mark Noble, a future club captain, first learned to pass a ball. In 2006, the team conceded an injury-time equaliser in the cup final, three minutes away from winning West Ham’s first silverware in 26 years. A few months after that, the families who had owned ...”

“... I have always wondered when my grandparents realised they would never see Russia again. In July 1917, when they locked up the house on Fourstatskaya Street in Petrograd, left the key with my grandfather’s valet and set off with a party of servants for Kislovodsk, a spa town in the north Caucasus, they told the children that they were all going for a summer holiday ...”

“... It is beautifully produced, but falls short of the scholarship of works in this area by F.M.L. Thompson, Mark Girouard and Brent Elliott, to which it owes a great deal. The text represents an extensive trawl of material, which is presented in the form of a verbal scrapbook covering a range of topics, under headings such ...”

“... of Byzantium upon his nostrils’. Jan Morris complains that the new replicas of the horses of St Mark ‘never saw old Dandolo storm ashore at the Golden Horn’: but neither did she. The subtitle is ‘A Sea Voyage’, which is not only a metaphor for the city’s marriage to the sea, but also a literal description of Jan Morris’s journey around the ...”

“... monarchy comparable in scholarly stature to Denis Mack Smith on the Kings of Italy. Dorothy Thompson’s study of Queen Victoria is thus the more to be welcomed, for she is a writer in a very different tradition from such conventional courtly biographers as Elizabeth Longford, Cecil Woodham-Smith and Georgina Battiscombe. She lectures in history at ...”

“... concerns itself with the likes of Paul Auster, Bram Stoker, William Burroughs, David Cronenberg, Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, J.G. Ballard and Hunter S. Thompson: in other words, men. He says more than once that he’s less interested in typewriters as machines (once upon a time the word also ...”

“... War, race relations, the New Deal and the Cold War. The intersection of two elements seems to mark a new area of peculiarly intense interest: in the early colonial period, much of North America was an immediate part of the British world (and some of its most important records are available therefore only in British archives); and Early Modern migration ...”

“... too relentless. But even his strongest critics will enjoy the splendidly intemperate emails to Mark Thompson, Alan Yentob and their ilk in which he set about the hopeless task of urging them to fly economy. Ever since the series W1A appeared, BBC managers have become a national joke. The problem is structural. Many start out as capable and engaged ...”

“... Books will count itself fortunate if it can sell as many. At £150 it will also not be prosecuted. Mark Philp has given himself a more difficult task. He has edited the new seven-volume edition of the Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, having edited previously, with some help from Marilyn Butler, all of Godwin’s novels. Philp is ...”

“... studies of the case and what it reveals about postwar Britain and its social structure. Thompson’s book is a mixture of all of these and the result is persuasive and revealing in some parts, absurd and tasteless in others. Yet it is a compelling read. The story doesn’t pall because it has become a myth and myths change with time. As the Lucan ...”

“... Elmer More whether his God was some kind of Santa Claus. Davie’s eloquent disagreement with E.P. Thompson allows us to see the strength of Davie’s uncompromising position, and also to see what he himself won’t see – or won’t allow himself to say he sees. Davie wishes to divorce Dissent and the Left in Britain, to show that Dissenters in religion ...”

“... find yourself thinking in the punchy voice of the continent. Every statement ends in a question mark, the preferred modifier is ‘bloody’, the aboriginals are the ‘bing-bongs’, and the interior is always known as ‘over there’, with a jerk of the thumb over the shoulder. For a travelling companion Tom has Prentice, a fellow convict whom he ...”

“... matter, no matter.’ I watch Nigel H. rehearse the pisspot scene, then walk round the garden with Mark Thompson before buying some plants on sale in the potting-shed and coming away. Except then I call in at the church which is full of the sound of hoovering, a friendly grey-haired man, Welsh, who may be the vicar, though I don’t like to ask, seemingly ...”

“... took stock of the reaction abroad, particularly in the United States. Years later, the journalist Mark Sullivan wrote in 1933, Americans could still remember the moment they read the news. Though not captured on film, the sinking of the Lusitania had the same kind of impact as JFK’s assassination or the attack on the Twin Towers. Today, of course, the ...”

“... All humans have been aroused by art, have cried before it – and destroyed it.In A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain called Titian’s Venus of Urbino ‘the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses’, joking that it was made for a brothel but ‘probably refused because it was a trifle too strong. In truth, it is too strong for any place but a ...”