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“... Dates have a funny way of imposing a preconceived analysis on the past. They can function by synecdoche: 1776 for the five years of the American Revolution, 1976 for the punk revolution and its aftermath. Or they can work by metonymy: 1789 stands for the dawn of modernity itself. When a book takes that sort of date for a title, it’s rarely more than a gimmick to spice up a familiar narrative ...”

“... In a speech​  at the University of East London in February 2010 David Cameron, then leader of the opposition, promised to lift the lid on ‘secret corporate lobbying’. The ‘far too cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money’, he said, would end on his watch. The full text of his speech isn’t easy to find – the Conservative Party erased ten years’ worth of speeches and press releases from its website in 2013 – but the internet doesn’t forget ...”

“... next three decades of frantic entanglement. Bowen had no intention of leaving her husband, Alan Cameron, to whom she was devoted. Their marriage, however, was unconsummated. Ritchie was not her first lover, but at her age, as he ungallantly observed, he might well be her last. She openly adored him, while he, an accomplished ladies’ man, longed for a ...”

“... to lull them in the security of their prejudices’. A year later, in Philadelphia, Edgar Allan Poe published ‘The Purloined Letter’. It wasn’t the first detective story – that was ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, in which an escaped orangutan turns out to have decapitated an old lady and shoved her daughter up a chimney – but it was the ...”

“... ever failed to get him to do so.’ Rider Haggard, in turn, obviously used Selous as a basis for Allan Quatermain in King Solomon’s Mines (1885). Like Selous, ‘Quatermain hunts trouserless and fortifies himself with cold tea.’ Then ‘life imitated art once again.’ Selous, in successive books, ‘sounded more and more like Ouatermain’. He became a ...”

“... no more’.The phrase has had several lives. It first appeared in a song by the Edinburgh poet Allan Ramsay published in 1724:Farewell to Lochaber, farewell to my JeanWhere heartsome wi’ her I ha’e many days beenFor Lochaber no more, Lochaber no moreWe’ll maybe return to Lochaber no more.The words were matched to an old melody, possibly ...”