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“... English still seemed to assume that literature in Britain meant anglophone literature published in London, and usually written there too. Anyone doubting that all this has changed for ever over the course of a generation which has seen the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and the founding of the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament needs only to feel ...”

“... and because the text we have is unfinished. Hytner drew in popular unrest of the sort shown in the Jack Cade scenes of Henry VI Part II and by the mob in Julius Caesar. To make Timon of Athens a play for today is to cut through a lot of differences between Jacobean and modern London. Again, this is defensible, given the ...”

“... evil and unjust.’ To limit the scandal, the authorities cannily decided not to court-martial Mad Jack, as he was known because of his reckless bravery, but to hospitalise him instead.On 18 August Owen finally summoned up the courage to knock on his fellow inmate’s door, clutching several copies of Sassoon’s first book, The Old Huntsman and Other ...”

“... Statesman already existed in India. (It still does, and those who have been inclined to bemoan the London magazine’s fate might reflect that there are worse ones. In recent years its Indian namesake, under the editorship of an Oxford-educated former Trotskyist, has become a cheerleader for the Hindu supremacist, ultra-right BJP.) The New Statesman’s ...”

“... which she returned to Brighton for two years, started painting as well as writing, returned to London, worked for a publisher, rented a room in Soho, wrote a novel, had it rejected, started another one, worked in a Cornish hotel, had a breakdown, escaped to Paris, came back, worked part-time as a secretary at the Royal College of Art, finished a second ...”

“... In fact he was an insider/outsider twice over, a peripheral Protestant at home washed up in alien London with only his wits and verbal dexterity to hawk. As such, he joined an honourable lineage of Irish licensed jesters from Oliver Goldsmith to Brendan Behan (Terry Wogan and Graham Norton are minor offshoots), men who punctured English pomposity and found ...”

“... and the ‘settler’ countries of Africa began to see him in their dreams. I have met women in London and Cape Town, Berlin and Los Angeles, who talked about this haunting. Sometimes he was a black priapic bogeyman; more often, he was a dark and reproachful presence who inspired unbearable guilt and terror. It seemed not to matter whether the dreamer was a ...”

“... a colleague at Aberystwyth who is also Plaid Cymru’s spokesman on energy. ‘I’m on it with Jack McConnell,’ I said. ‘Who’s McConnell?’ ‘Scottish First Minister.’ ‘Well, I never . . .’ This was a benign version of the Jowett syndrome but serious enough: Westminster, Holyrood and Cardiff have become places apart. As the days tick away ...”

“... while Lloyd George loved the idea of Wales he was in fact soon bored by it and greatly preferred London. (It was the same with his family: he proclaimed his devotion very loudly but consistently neglected it.) In effect he was making the whole principality of Wales his political base and gradually extending his role from spokesman for Welsh Nonconformity to ...”

“... from first to last, is to demonise its subject. The young Cromwell was ‘an opportunistic jack-the-lad, a ruffian on the make’. Possessed of a ‘remarkable gift of low animal cunning’ and a ‘capacity for raw deceit’, the mature statesman was ‘ambitious and totally corrupt’; quite properly, ‘the most hated man in the kingdom’, not ...”

“... In 1989, I was invited to a party in London. I was a graduate student at Oxford, supposedly writing a dissertation on D.H. Lawrence but actually doing nothing of the sort. Instead, I’d completed a short novel; an extract from it had appeared in this paper, as had a poem and a review. It was on the basis of these that I must have been invited that night to the party, which was a celebration of the London Review of Books’s tenth anniversary ...”

“... almost all the colonies, protectorates and overseas dependencies that had been under the Union Jack. The confluence between colonialism and immigration – the theme of Patel’s book – was initially a joining of two currents of displacement. The first was the torrent of British emigrants moving to the empire. A 1901 survey found that nearly three ...”

“... rare book collections served those with more specialised needs.New York couldn’t compete with London or Paris: it had no bouquinistes, no Farringdon Road, no British Library or Bibliothèque nationale de France. It lacked the quaint bookshops of Boston, where the staff seemed to know not only the books they sold but their 18th and 19th-century ...”

“... in lost export earnings, but this was trifling compared to the symbolic impact of a decision by Jack Welch, Chief Executive of the General Electric Corporation, to postpone a long-planned business trip. After all, US companies have invested more in India in the last two years than in all the previous forty. Addressing a meeting of financiers in ...”

“... few publications that directly developed or refined the notion of the 17th-century crisis. In 1991 Jack Goldstone’s Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World sought to subsume the idea into a far larger pattern of cyclical unrest and rebellion, whose most significant determinant was population expansion and its pressures. By the later 1990s it was ...”