“... and Farm Aid, and Red Wedge, and Rock the Vote, and Live 8, Coldplay, U2, the late and the later John Lennon, and perhaps almost as many good causes as there are actors. It can only be a matter of time, surely, before Eminem turns, however briefly, to Christ and begins to walk in the way of righteousness, as Alice Cooper, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Roy ...”

“... hospitals in unmarked vans, and unloaded at back entrances. I heard about despair. I heard General John Abizaid, commander of US Central Command, say of the insurgents: ‘I don’t think that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away ...”

“... country … The silence, I find, is a factor which has enabled the evil to spread.’ Likewise John Gordon, in the Sunday Express, who seized on John Gielgud’s arrest for importuning in 1953 as a chance to rip aside the ‘protective veil’ of delicacy around this ‘repulsive’ and ‘peculiarly ...”

“... shine. The phones still charge. Does it matter that the old electricity suppliers of eastern and north-west England and the English Midlands, the coal-fired power stations of Kingsnorth, Ironbridge and Ratcliffe-on-Soar, the turbine shops at Hams Hall, the oil and gas stations on the Isle of Grain, Killingholme, Enfield and Cottam are the property of E.ON of ...”

“... So it comes as a bigger shock than the salmonella scare (Edwina Currie, 1988) or the BSE scare (John Selwyn Gummer, 1990) to hear the latest strand in the table talk: that the era of endless food is winding down.This belief is new. Until recently the discussion was largely about quality. Quantity and availability only entered the picture when we wondered ...”

“... chemistry and then physics, and also took a seminar (only one other student enrolled) with Alfred North Whitehead on the Principia Mathematica, which Whitehead had written with Bertrand Russell twenty years earlier. However, once Oppenheimer had decided on physics he was champing at the bit to be ‘near the centre’ of the discipline. In the Anglophone ...”

“... about the nature of money, we need to travel to the Pacific Ocean. In Micronesia, about 1800 miles north of the eastern corner of Australia, there’s a group of islands called Yap. It has a population of 11,000 and is largely unvisited except by divers, but it’s a very popular place with economists talking about the nature of money, starting with a ...”

“... War. There were Kipling’s vivid stories of Sussex life through the ages, and then there was John Buchan’s The Path of the King, tracing ancestral virtues and vices from a Viking prince to Abraham Lincoln, taking in the depravities of Titus Oates. Even before reading these quite gripping books, we were vaguely acquainted, through schools, comics and ...”

“... her Renault 5, or Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp of Changing Places crossing somewhere above the North Pole as their planes take them in opposite directions for the start of their academic job-swap. Two ideas setting off for each other’s point of origin: Paradise News lacks this beautifully simple dynamic, because everyone jumps on the same ...”

“... lighter in tonality, distinctly medieval in mood. Wycliffe reading his translation of the Bible to John of Gaunt, Chaucer and Gower present was started in 1847, a year before the foundation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Nevertheless it has the feel of a Pre-Raphaelite picture. Brown was never a member of the Brotherhood. But his steadfast professionalism ...”

“... good land had attracted Government interest. In 1905 the Colonial Secretary asked him to go out to North America to report on the labour colonies set up by the Salvation Army in the hope of making men out of Britain’s derelicts, and to consider whether this was an idea on which the Government could build. General Booth’s Army was but one of many such ...”

“... marches and countermarches; it even became an issue in the Virginia Senate campaign between Oliver North (who favoured the flag) and Charles Robb (who opposed it). A proposed exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum to mark the 50th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb produced howls of outrage from veterans’ organisations, who charged ...”

“... of the human settlement of that great hulk of fissured, pre-Cambrian rock that juts into the North Atlantic is one of harsh times getting steadily harsher. As I write, headlines in the Toronto Globe & Mail promise worse to come: ATLANTIC FISHERY DEALT NEW BLOW. SHUTDOWNS COULD LAST TILL END OF DECADE ‘The [groundfish] stocks are in the worst shape ...”

“... at 10 Rillington Place, West London, an address later notorious as the home of the mass murderer John Christie. The same Home Secretary, Maxwell Fyfe, by now a ‘charlatan’ with ‘all the arrogance of the truly ignorant’, contended that there had been no miscarriage of justice and was content to believe that by an odd coincidence two murderers had ...”

“... mark is all over this novel, not just in the muscular, shouldering prose style – the style of John Self – but in Ripley’s rich tangle of adolescent preoccupations, his Charles Highway-like obsession with bodily products (‘matutinal lungbung’ in particular), with his own appearance (‘My tasty eyes ... Much is the womanly bullshit that has been ...”