“... Gothic buttresses to the back range. A floor divides the hall into two storeys and a homely Queen Anne front with apricot stucco and dark green-blue paint looks out on the lawns and shrubberies. I lost my heart to this history-stored house and long to know the succession of its owners ... From Wilcotes we descended to Finstock, which begins at the bottom of ...”

“... Bomb, a bestseller written by the Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich and his (uncredited) wife, Anne, predicted that there would soon not be enough food to support the human population and that famines in the 1970s would kill hundreds of millions. The only way to prevent this, they said, was strict birth control measures. ‘We must have population control ...”

“... And with the cinema too music is often the most powerful stimulant: I watched The Diary of Anne Frank for a time without tears until the arrival of some soupy music left me with two sodden handkerchiefs. So I am manifestly one of a host in whom tears are a cheap commodity. It always surprises me, therefore, when intelligent people talk with ...”

“... War were for earlier generations. Their image of a child murdered by a genocidal state will not be Anne Frank but Hind Rajab, the six-year-old girl killed by Israeli tank fire as she sat in a car pleading for help, surrounded by the bodies of her murdered relatives. When they chant ‘We are all Palestinians,’ they are moved by the same feeling of solidarity ...”

“... her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily Dickinson was hardly cold in the grave when Todd made a bid to edit her poems and ride ...”

“... In jeans with rips at the knee, red and black running trainers and a caramel jumper, he has brown-grey swept-up hair and tanned skin with a few wrinkles. He takes me to a corner sitting room with a lit fire; a small clock on the mantelpiece, flanked by two candlesticks with pink candles, will chime the hours. Larta brings me a cup of tea in a mug ...”

“... our values’ was aspirational rather than factual. As Beck makes clear, when it came to fighting brown-skinned barbarians – whether in the Black Hills of Dakota, the Philippine jungle, or the Mekong Delta – torture was as American as cherry pie.Many Americans (including myself) believed Obama would bring an end to the Bush administration’s ...”

“... box. When I get to the village I find that one of these pensioners was our ex-postman Maurice Brown. I ask him whether the Queen spoke to him. ‘No. She only stopped at people who had something wrong with them. I haven’t, so she just gave me the money.’29 March, Yorkshire. Easter Saturday and an appropriately monastic day out, going first via ...”

“... the start of the 2007 season. Eleven pitches, trampled by hard-swearing enthusiasts, were lost. Anne Woollett of the Hackney Marshes User Group complained that the Olympic Development Authority (ODA) had sequestered portions of East Marsh, a year ahead of their promise, to construct ‘a huge 12-lane motorway’. The ODA admitted that two trenches had ...”

“... the bottom line? In fact, as Leys and Player show, it was the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown that began replacing the public components of the NHS with private ones, the effect concealed by large spending increases, long before Lansley and Cameron took charge. If the Conservatives and their Liberal allies are dismantling the NHS, it was Labour that ...”