You’re history, we say […] . Surely it is an American idiom. Impossible to imagine a postwar European saying, “You’re history. . . . That’s history,” meaning fuhgeddaboudit, pal.

. . . although a little apt to get buried under a cartload of written pleadings, . . .

The topping of stone walls all around the Sheffield area, which looks like large, crude, black lumps of Aero chocolate, is in fact furnace slag mostly from cementation furnaces. It has its own dialect name – crozzle.

She sprang out from their midst like the Virgin in a busy Annunciation, calm as Mary and nimbed with that unmistakable aura of the chosen.