“... distant, yet oddly warm because sincere. They are raw enough to be real, and composed enough to ward off the possibility of identification. We are not Susan Sontag; she is still superior. She is never unserious, ignorant or corrupt. The notebooks reveal two things it’s helpful to know. One is how she got her education. She took it from the best ...”

“... last illness. He talks about hospital services being deliberately run down and the difficulties of ward care due to shortage of staff but it’s only gradually I realise that what he wants is for me to try and write a play about it. I explain what a slow worker I am and how long the trek from conception to execution but it still sounds like an excuse. He’s ...”

“... with all the hardships of his young life. While he was in St James’s one of the patients on his ward hanged himself in the toilets, presumably driven mad by the intolerable itching. Michael P. is as kindly as ever and me as dull, three old(-ish) men having their lunch, next stop the bowling green. 10 March. To Durham where there are not many visitors this ...”

“... of formal education. So she started writing about the law instead, in pieces about the Stephen Ward and Lady Chatterley trials for Esquire, Jack Ruby for Life, the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial for the Saturday Evening Post. ‘The law, the workings of the law, the daily application of the law to people and situations, is an essential element in a country’s ...”

“... Dowie, Jimmy Dyce, Charlie Logan, Margaret Logan, Bert Lumsden, George Manclark, Derek Stubbs, Peter Young and also Alex Falconer’). As this shows, they didn’t all have to be men, but usually they were. There is no doubt that Brown tried to re-create these bonds with groups of personal allies throughout his political career, and he often succeeded. His ...”

“... unwatchable.She also seems to have had plenty of Sunset Boulevard moments in which she tried to ward off the ‘sad and stealing messengers of grey’. Tim Mendelson, her personal assistant for the last few years of her life, said it took her two hours to do her make-up; an hour devoted just to her eyes. It was complicated for Taylor to have built a career ...”

“... have been at the school during those years, and saw that his first friends could have been Paul Ward, Brian Foster and Terry Klepka.Many of our modern crimes are crimes of the imagination. We think of the unspeakable and exchange information on it. We commit a ‘thought-crime’ – giving the illicit or the abominable an audience. Some of us pretend to ...”

“... the mere thought of liberated sex: Thursday, 26 September 1963: The Denning Report on the Profumo-Ward case is out. Apparently it says that well-known actors were at these filthy parties. It is a disgrace that such people should bring our profession into disrepute in this vile way. Thank the powers that my own private fantasies have been left to wrestle with ...”

“... life’s work. 24 April. I like uniforms. I preferred nurses when they looked like nurses not just ward cleaners. I found the sight of district nurses in their navy blue raincoats both reassuring and appropriate. White coats have gone too now, with doctors indistinguishable from patients except that the doctors are in shirt-sleeves. I like white coats. But ...”

“... work was called Wound for a Crucifixion. John Russell described it as being ‘set in a hospital ward … On a sculptor’s armature was a large section of human flesh: a specimen wound.’ It didn’t sell, so Bacon took it home and destroyed it, something he would continue to do throughout his life. This time, he regretted the loss: ‘I may never be able ...”

“... Israel’s Western patrons have turned out to be the country’s worst enemies, ushering their ward deeper into hallucination. As Evron said, Western powers act against their ‘own interests and apply to Israel a special preferential relationship, without Israel seeing itself obligated to reciprocate’. Consequently, ‘the special treatment given to ...”

“... spoke to anybody, the shop was privately run so you couldn’t afford to shop here anyway.’ Peter Harris, another volunteer, was one of the first to move in, from his native Fakenham, in 2008. His career as a road engineer had been cut short when he slipped while carrying a 75kg kerbstone and badly injured his back. He hasn’t worked since. The ...”

“... Sontag magnetised the camera her entire career, a watchful muse and Medusa starer in portraits by Peter Hujar (whose photographs line the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly ...”

“... Court were now to declare his re-election by a dying and unrepresentative assembly illegal? To ward off disaster, the ISI had been preparing blackmail flicks: agents secretly filmed some of the Supreme Court judges in flagrante. But so unpopular had Musharraf become that even the sight of judicial venerables in bed might not have done the trick. It might ...”

“... leverage is bound to grow. No diplomatic revolution is in prospect. But Russia has ceased to be a ward of the West. How has the change been received there? Reactions to Putin’s regime vary, but they form a certain pattern, falling within a given range. At one end of the spectrum, there is virtually unconditional endorsement of the Russia that is now ...”