One item is that you have a mix of curly quotes around the “Ah,” for example) and straight quotes around the "Mostly, it is a matter of temperature control.<br class=" for instance. If I modify the quotes to curly quotes for the content:
Code:
<p class="msonormal3">“Ah,” Pen Rel said again, and inclined his head. “Mostly, it is a matter of temperature control.<br class="calibre13"/>How much simpler, after all, to let the wandering air take the heat away than to condition the dock entire.”</p>
and then run the regex as “.*?”, it finds two items,
“Ah,” and
“Mostly, it is a matter of temperature control.<br class="calibre13"/>How much simpler, after all, to let the wandering air take the heat away than to condition the dock entire.” which is more or less correct.
You might want to try smartening the punctuation.
BTW, using a <br> to break in the middle of a paragraph is a bad idea. Let the renderer break the lines where it needs to.