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“... as a visitor, he attended the meetings of the large and influential 29th division in Shire Lane. Every Wednesday and Friday he attended Thelwall’s political lectures at Beaufort Buildings in the Strand, and wrote long summaries of them for the Home Office. His dedication is awe-inspiring, especially for a man who was holding down a job as theatre ...”

“... that Dickens was then busy launching; one thanked a Sheffield firm (innocently mentioned in David Copperfield) for the gift of a set of knives; another attempted to patch up his lapsed friendship with George Cruikshank, who had probably been offended by Dickens’s attacks on his temperance pamphlets; another was a long, newsy report to a Swiss friend ...”

“... work and any other issues that needed to be talked over’: On either side of a rock-paved lane, Two files of men are standing barefooted, Bearded, waistcoated, each with a tam-o’-shanter On his head, and most with a set half-smile That comes from their companionship with rock, With soft mists, with rain, with roaring gales, And from a diet of solan ...”

“... A strong scent of weed mixed with odours from the Cordon Bleu cooking school down Marylebone Lane. From the moment he’d rescued me on that misty night in Swiss Cottage, Harry had planned for me, as a presumably responsible adult, to take over his duties at Number 56. Simply put, my new job was to smuggle American deserters in and out of the United ...”

“... remained, as the Kent county surveyor of the time would later admit, ‘little more than a country lane’. As these belching monsters – which were, of course, small by the standards of the EU’s present European Modular System – ground their way along this scarcely improved turnpike road, they crawled through a string of startled villages before reaching ...”

“... Broken Telephone, Arab Phone, Silent Mail, Cordless Phone, Grapevine, Dead Phone, Whisper down the Lane. Thirlwell invited sixty authors to take part in the project, and the list is a roll call of many of the most interesting writers of contemporary fiction. The translations veer from subtle fidelity of the kind Borges asks us not to believe in to forms of ...”

“... be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours lacking this obscene quantum of liquidity might well complain about the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the damage to their foundations. It doesn’t signify. And ...”

“... David Foster Wallace’s parents, Sally and Jim, were the sort of couple who read each other Ulysses in bed while holding hands. Jim read David and his younger sister Amy Moby-Dick as a bedtime story. It wasn’t inevitable that the boy would grow up to write an epic novel, but it wasn’t accidental ...”

“... stacking trucks and vans in muddy sheds alongside the railway in Stratford. Chobham Farm, Angel Lane, Stratford East: a wonderful bucolic address, backed up by a traditional railway pub and a vine-draped cottage out of Thomas Hardy. The cottage and the titular angel path would be illegally obliterated, with posthumous apologies, at the great Olympic moment ...”

“... the first known use of the word in English was in 1230, when an Oxford street was named Gropecunt Lane. Paul Dacre, that nice man who edits the Daily Mail, has become famous in recent times for ‘double-cunting’: a colleague, usually male, will be ticked off via a thunderous, compound deployment of the Old Frisian. ‘You call that a good cunting ...”

“... which has recently been brilliantly treated in a collection of essays edited by Jenny Doctor, David Wright and Nicholas Kenyon.* In terms (for instance) of its performing space, the crucial dates were 1893 and 1941 (when the Queen’s Hall was destroyed and the concerts moved to the Albert Hall); in terms of sponsorship and organisation, the key years ...”

“... is never quite a ‘life’. Now at last we have a biography that pulls out all the right stops. David Riggs provides a fastidious, challenging and compassionate reading of the man. Not everyone will agree with some of its psychiatrist’s couch diagnoses – anal fixations, stepfather traumas, and so on – though personally I find them convincing. There is ...”

“... of the latest supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography there are photographs of David Niven, Diana Dors, Eric Morecambe, John Betjeman and William Walton. Dors has a leering ‘Come up and read me sometime’ expression on her face and Niven wears his yacht-club greeter’s smile. Morecambe seems to be laughing at one of his own ...”

“... applause’. Her career blossomed. By the age of 18 she was appearing at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. The metropolitan critics sharpened their pens. While it was considered that ‘her fine figure and graceful movements were displayed to advantage’ in The Belle’s Stratagem, it seems that her acting and way with the words may have been less ...”

“... late in life. When we first meet him he’s in his mid-thirties, lives in a nice house in Chancery Lane, has a horse called Chancery, works in the Court of Chancery – you get the idea. Sansom has given his hero his own passion for the law, its stately, logical protocols, its civility and rationalism. Shardlake has a gimlet eye and a sharp mind. His character ...”