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“... letters have been gathered together in the National Library of Scotland, where they cry out for a collected edition. When such an edition appears, they cannot fail to be recognised as a masterpiece of Scottish literature. I came, while engaged in writing ...”

“... Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) in his San Francisco hotel room to discuss the delivery of a mysterious ornament. The elevator attendant points him in the direction of Room 12c. After some cagey preliminaries, Spade delivers a ferocious ultimatum. Once out in the corridor again, he unlocks ...”

“... The penis, in the contemporary novel, has been a mighty matter, looming large. Who will forget the narrator of The Bell Jar seeing an adult penis for the first time and being both fascinated and repelled? (‘The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed ...”

“... Patrick Hamilton is remembered today, if at all, for the short pre-war novel Hangover Square, and the stage thrillers Rope and Gaslight. They are good of their kind, but they lack the feel of involuntary masterpieces which still attends their up till now vanished predecessor – the trilogy of novels brought together in 1935 as Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky ...”

“... Some day they’re gonna write a blues song for fighters. It’ll just be for slow guitar, soft trumpet and a  bell.’ So said Sonny Liston in 1962, after he’d beaten his closest rival, Floyd Patterson, and become Heavyweight Champion of the World. Liston was not known for his sensitivity ...”

“... On the face of it, Quintin Hogg ought to be a great historic figure. He comes into the history books as the victorious pro-Munich candidate at the famous Oxford by-election of 1938, is Under-Secretary for Air in Churchill’s Government by 1945, First Lord of the Admiralty at the time of Suez, the head of various other ministries, Tory Party Chairman and, for a record 12 years, Lord Chancellor, formally the country’s highest office ...”

“... In 1979-80, a six-part documentary called The Mighty Micro was broadcast on ITV. Written and presented by the late Christopher Evans of the National Physical Laboratory, and based on his book of the same name, the series looked at the ways the world might be changed by the microcomputer revolution ...”

“... A mutter of disquiet undulated through the clan-proud, old-stock Daughters of the American Revolution when Franklin Roosevelt once impishly greeted them as ‘my fellow immigrants’. Roosevelt later elaborated: ‘All of our people all over the country – except the pure-blooded Indians – are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, including even those who came over here on the Mayflower ...”

“... We are not short of descriptions of Russia’s war against Napoleon; so at least you might think. This was, after all, Russia’s first ‘great patriotic war’, and Russian historians, pre-revolutionary, Soviet and post-Soviet, have not missed the opportunity to extol the heroism and patriotism of their soldiers and peasants ...”

“... A year after the Great Fall, there is already a fin-de-siècle air about memoirs of the Thatcher era. It seems so long ago. The lady herself clutches on to a form of political existence more as a menace than a force ...”

“... David Jones was staying in the Chelsea flat of the BBC’s Assistant Director of Programme Planning, Harman Grisewood, as the bombs fell on London in the autumn of 1940. During one raid, a near miss blew a bus off course; it went through the window of Sainsbury’s on the King’s Road ...”

“... to assign him to the latter. Information about Maxwell Knight is pretty scanty and unreliable at most stages of his life, but a copy of his birth certificate may be obtained from the usual source, and was surely worth looking at; it is also more precise about Knight’s place of birth ...”

“... On​ the evening of 22 August 1566, a crowd gathered in the town of ’s-Hertogenbosch to listen to an open air sermon by an itinerant Protestant preacher. Afterwards they rushed from church to church, singing psalms and smashing images. Two days later, the reformers held their first sermon in the town cathedral, now purified of the paintings and statues they believed tempted churchgoers into idolatry or lust ...”

“... A scientific​ revolution is underway in the way we investigate and understand the past. The extraction and analysis of ancient DNA from human skeletal remains, the field in which David Reich is a leading researcher, is a technical advance that eclipses the advent of radiocarbon dating in the 1950s, and is already transforming our knowledge, not only of human biological evolution, but also of human history and culture ...”

“... his glasses with the thick end of his unfailing tie. Among the features of these spy stories is a concern with patriotism and uncertainty, not least with the uncertainties of patriotism. There are passages which can be hard to follow. Some are touched with the complexities of spyspeak; some, after all, are offered ...”