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“... revealed. As Holroyd says, the appalling monster-bores of Hamilton’s pub, the Midnight Bell (which is also the title of the trilogy’s first volume), ‘divert us by driving the other characters to distraction’, as they pursue their inanely meticulous little ploys. They are all around us, not shown from a distance. As Keats remarked of his ...”

“... were determined to get ahead of the game – was Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, published in 1994, which made the case that differences in IQ between racial groups should be factored into policy-making. But Slobodian shows that this was just the tip of a Mont Pelerin-sized iceberg: you didn’t have to look hard in the 1990s and ...”

“... immigrants (over eight million) than any other state, and which is conventionally regarded as a bell-wether state, will no longer have any ethnic majority. Latinos and ‘Anglos’ will each make up about 40 per cent of the largest state’s population (around 35 million). Asians, at more than 10 per cent, will outnumber blacks. Small wonder that in the ...”

“... 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. ‘I was going out to see if I could do anything,’ Grisewood reported ...”

“... le Carré knew one another, but doesn’t see fit to add that le Carré – under his real name, David Cornwell – illustrated one or two of Knight’s post-war publications (e.g. Talking Birds, 1961): a not uninteresting detail in a story that includes spies and intrigues among its ingredients, just as le Carré’s do. Then, there’s an episode ...”

“... 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. The potential value ...”

“... wealth on art. There were similar attacks all over Europe, from the British Isles to the Balkans.David Freedberg, who teaches art history at Columbia (and who was, long ago, my dissertation adviser), describes himself as ‘haunted’ by the question of what it is about art that arouses such fierce responses. Most academic art history considers the social ...”

“... their enemies. On one side is a country which consists of charming, sometimes simple souls, Toby Bell of the Foreign Office and, simplicissimus, Sir Kit Probyn, late of the Foreign Office. Seldom can a department of state have done so much for the casting of a fiction. Each is a little like that rural innocent of Evelyn Waugh’s who was sent to Africa with ...”

“... have a memory of reciting ‘Daddy’ aloud to my father as he tried not to laugh. Next came The Bell Jar, then the unabridged journals, published in 2000 and edited by Karen Kukil, who in the acknowledgments thanks her acupuncturist for keeping her healthy. The chronology at the beginning of Plath’s Collected Prose attempts to raise her into a ...”

“... So the majority are actresses (Elsie and Leigh), academics (Cam and Darbishire), artists (Bell, Cohen, Knight) or authors (Allingham, Blyton, Compton-Burnett, Sackville-West and Sitwell), topped off with occasional politicians (Astor, Bonham Carter and Lady Lloyd-George) and royals (Princess Marina, Queen Victoria Eugénie, the Princess Royal). Vera ...”

“... The enclosure in front of me also has a pool, and a bridge spanning a hoop of tunnel. At 2 p.m., a bell rings. The shed doors open and a gang of Asiatic black bears (Ursus thibetanus), easily identifiable by the pale crescents splashed across the dark fur of their chests, bundles out into the steamy April sunshine. Muzzles flickering aloft, they scent ...”

“... hay-meadows, musical with skylarks and linnets, the chalk downs halcyon with milk-wort and bell-flowers; 97 per cent of meadow-land has gone since the war; 150,000 miles of hedgerow at 11,000 miles a year; 200,000 farms; 880,000 jobs (more than three-quarters of the total). In the past quarter-century, three-quarters of the song thrushes have gone and ...”

“... the popular version of Scottish history that once flourished in pubs and school playgrounds, Henry Bell invented steam navigation when the Comet began its regular voyages between Glasgow, Greenock and Helensburgh in the summer of Napoleon’s advance on Moscow. In fact, Robert Fulton’s steamboat Clermont had started running on the Hudson in 1807, and in the ...”

“... thanks to propaganda campaigns spearheaded by Bullingdon Club toffs like Boris Johnson and David Cameron, underwent significant revision. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the horse path alongside the Regent’s Canal was mud, and forbidden to pedestrians and cyclists alike, I rode to my gardening job in Limehouse on a market wreck bought for ...”

“... trafficking in what should not be sold, especially when it doesn’t sell? A thought triggered by David Willetts’s amiable description of the publications a distinguished scholar might bring to the RAE as ‘a good back catalogue’. Austin and Wittgenstein had plenty of thoughts, and a huge influence on philosophy, but at the time of their death almost no ...”