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“... but to a ‘railway conductor, a seamstress, a house painter, a lathe operator, a panel beater, a cook, three bakers, a hairdresser, two postal workers – one retired’. Many flats had been divided during the economic downturn of the 1930s, now the rest followed. Families shared toilets and kitchens; parquet was covered over with linoleum. This Schöneberg ...”

“... all the amphetamine gunslingers proved their manhood: Jim Thompson, Harry Dean Stanton and Robin Cook (a.k.a. Derek Raymond). Penman was the writer who isn’t in the book, talking to people who are, or were, or ought to be. His patch was cinema arcana, curating the ‘sessions men’ as he calls them, jobbing actors with faces full of motel ...”

“... the land of the giants wasn’t really there. That changed with the voyages of Vitus Bering, James Cook and George Vancouver, who between 1728 and 1794 mapped out most of the west coast of Canada and Alaska. They were looking for a strait and an inland sea supposedly discovered by Juan de Fuca and Bartholomew de Fonte in 1592 and 1640. Unfortunately, the ...”

“... 1961 in London’s Fortune Theatre where I was appearing with my colleagues and co-writers Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore in Beyond the Fringe.It was a smash hit, with every night the audience studded with celebrities, and accordingly at one performance there was the queen. My particular tour de force in the second half was an Anglican ...”

“... the same wary pragmatism. It is, I agree, ‘startling’ (the word used by Alan Sked and Chris Cook in their Post-War Britain: A Political History) to find the Director-General of the CBI saying during the General Election campaign of 1974 that the 1971 Act had ‘sullied every relationship at every level between unions and employers and ought to be ...”

“... and he had ‘a regular blow-up with Farenza who has behaved abominably’. ‘My confounded Cook has gone mad, I believe with political excitement.’ His cough became so troublesome that ‘I am perfectly beaten down and worn out.’ ‘That liar Manin’ was to blame; and so was Pio Nono’s vanity. Worst of all was Palmerston, whose ‘mischievous ...”

“... with wartime controls was an aberration. (Wartime America was much less obedient.) Cartoon by David Langdon for ‘Punch’, November 1949. Mark Roodhouse’s answer to the crude question of just how much black market activity there was in Britain, both during the war and in the period of postwar austerity, is that, though widespread, it was far less so ...”

“... into a wide range of matters of public interest, from the Aberfan disaster to the death of David Kelly, Profumo to tabloid phone hacking. On 15 June 2009, Gordon Brown announced an inquiry into the Iraq war – to investigate, as Sir John Chilcot, the inquiry’s chairman, put it, ‘the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made ...”

“... part of Molly’s memory of weekend mornings when all four of them – including her husband, David, who is absent through work for most of the novel – would lie together on the big bed: ‘Every single other thing – from the exhaustion of the week to evolution itself – is in the interest of this. This pure lack of desire. The need for absolutely ...”

“... number of survivors miraculously trickled back to England. Among them were the ship’s captain, David Cheap; his second-in-command, Robert Baynes; the chief gunner, John Bulkeley; the carpenter, John Cummins; and three young midshipmen, John Byron, Alexander Campbell and Isaac Morris. They returned home in rival groups, by different routes, telling ...”

“... them to eat in the staff canteen if they want to eat in a restaurant. They think the in-house cook offers up the wrong things. We deliver what they order up.’ The consequences of this change for the culture of the BBC were profound. In one sense, producers found their new role as salesmen invigorating. What Born describes as a ‘new seduction, a ...”

“... Now King David was old and stricken in years; and they covered him with clothes, but he gat no heat. Wherefore his servants said unto him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat ...”

“... including the charismatic sculptor and Bloomsbury habitué Stephen Tomlin, and the novelist David Garnett, whose publishing connections were to prove invaluable. Now in her late twenties, Warner was hungry for new experiences. In July 1922, while she was browsing in the cheap section of Whiteley’s Department Store in Bayswater, she noticed a map of ...”

“... of a century arranging the ingredients for the catastrophe. Lenin said of Stalin that ‘this cook will give us peppery dishes,’ and for all the talk of nation-building, democracy promotion, multiculturalism and tribal recognition, globalisation à la Nato has been a peppery dish. There were several chefs involved: Bill and Hillary Clinton, George ...”

“... Excalibur perhaps, links up the parts of the novel and is symbolic in its action. A Welshman, David Jones, runs away to sea, survives the sinking of the Titanic, becomes a cook in New York, marries Ludmilla, the daughter of his Russian employer, returns to Wales and the First World War. He is in Ireland during the ...”