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“... with which he wound up his adolescence recalls something of Kepler’s horoscope of himself: Eric John Ernest Hobsbawm, a tall, angular, dangly, ugly, fair-haired fellow of 18½, quick on the uptake, with a considerable if superficial stock of general knowledge and a lot of original ideas, general and theoretical. An incorrigible striker of attitudes, which ...”

“... practical expression’ of ‘the spirit of Dunkirk and the Blitz’. (Weight misses Michael Foot’s 1949 pamphlet on domestic reform entitled Who Are the Patriots Now?) A different kind of identity came to fruition during the Attlee Administration: new institutions were called ‘National’ or ‘British’ instead of ‘Royal’ – the NHS, the ...”

“... by acting as mules, delivering packages to safehouses in the US. But the carrying capacity of a foot-slogger is no match for a commercial trailer, or the hydraulic arm of a towtruck, or a hidden compartment in an outsize SUV. The impressive quantities of narcotics confiscated along the US/Mexican border in 2009-10 (three million kilos of ...”

“... a thick turtleneck sweater, highly polished cavalry boots and, draped around his neck, a seven-foot puce muffler knitted by his mother. He refused to use a gas-mask and was twice lightly gassed, earning two of his 20 citations for wounds and decorations for bravery. It is hard to avoid the thought that he wanted bystanders, particularly the newsmen who ...”

“... contemporaneously. But the three officers connected with these documents – Vernon Attwell, John Donaldson and Thomas Style – had signed witness statements in December 1974 stating that the manuscript notes were contemporaneous, and they had repeated this on oath in the trial in 1975. If the rough typed notes were indeed a draft from which the ...”

“... along; my mother is still indignant. (‘I never liked her or her weird diet.’) Said PG was four-foot-ten and 90 pounds – a tiny, frail, somewhat eccentric Jewish-Canadian vegan with gluten allergies who wore rubberised Doc Martens and played the medieval viel. We once visited all the Cathar fortresses together. I miss her a lot sometimes – especially ...”

“... ran to Daniyal and rubbed itself against his leg, making him miss one of the balls. He puts his foot on its head and crushes it. At the sounds of the cracking bones, ‘the Prince’s eyes glanced for one smiling second into those of Gunevati.’ She faints. Daniyal saunters up to Amar as if to start a casual conversation, defying him to object to this ...”

“... groups showing Leonid Ilyich solving engineering problems for an audience of awed scientists, six-foot Brezhnev pencils from the Karl Liebknecht Pencil Factory, Asian rugs embroidered with words of squirming servility, miniature machine tools presented with love from the working people of Krasnodar, a Vietnamese portrait of him wearing a real suit and with ...”

“... Gloucester Crescent gardens. And a proper snake it is, too, a real boa constrictor, all of nine foot long and answering to the name of Ayesha, who has made the journey from Chipping Norton together with her slightly smaller friend and companion Clementine, both in the care of their handler.I have had unfortunate experiences with animal handlers as indeed ...”

“... saying ‘That were foolishness to think’ or ‘Vain is resistance now’ or ‘Art thou firm of foot/ To tread the ways of danger?’ Things tend to happen with noisy ostentation (‘Fast, on the intervening buckler, fell/The Azteca’s stone faulchion’); humdrum thoughts are translated into decorous orotundity (‘Is it a crime/To mount the ...”

“... signified the maturity of Henry’s power, his dynastic grip. The last earl of Lincoln had been John de la Pole, the Yorkist claimant to the throne, killed fighting Henry VII at the battle of Stoke in 1487. His younger brother, Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, was executed in 1513; his brother William was securely shut in the Tower; another ...”

“... who have kicked over the traces and made good Down South. The novelist and ex-Bingley librarian John Braine of Room at the Top fame will later come into the same category.The only writer she does read with any regularity, though, has nothing to do with the North at all. This is Beverley Nichols, of whose column in Woman’s Own she is a devoted fan, and ...”

“... had to dig down into a stash hidden behind a sofa to show me the trophy he won in 1975. ‘Top 139-foot Trawler’, the plate reads, with the value of the catch engraved down to the last pound: £311,666. As the skipper, Hardie got five per cent, minus five per cent of the cost of the trip – a haul, for three weeks’ work, of perhaps £100,000 in today’s ...”

“... hospitals in unmarked vans, and unloaded at back entrances. I heard about despair. I heard General John Abizaid, commander of US Central Command, say of the insurgents: ‘I don’t think that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away ...”

“... presented; the brief preliminary introduction to each is sensible, as is the annotation at the foot of the page, and the bibliographical commentary that closes the volumes. This is in most ordinary ways a wonderful collection of Coleridge’s poems, and the two books of plays are a thoroughly useful addition. Beyond this, there are problems. Many are ...”