“... gentleman who told Bathurst about his reluctant withdrawal from the pleasures of life was Sir Peter de la Billière, commander-in-chief of British forces during the first Gulf War, whose deafening began when he was still in his twenties (he was born in 1934). He was downgraded on the basis of his poor hearing at the age of 36, but appealed and was ...”

“... In one meeting, Woodward reports, Cohn lost his patience with Trump and his favoured economic guru Peter Navarro, who had been reinforcing the president’s view that trade deficits mean America is getting screwed. ‘“If you just shut the fuck up and listen,” Cohn said to both Trump and Navarro, “you might learn something.”’ The only possible source ...”

“... what makes his book especially interesting is how he came to know what he claims to know. He has read everything on the Afghan insurgency and the civil wars that followed, and has been given access to the original manuscript of Robert Gates’s memoir (Gates was director from 1991 to 1993), but his main source is some two hundred interviews conducted between ...”

“... to the homes of their customers, especially the wealthier ones, to fit them in situ. John Read worked ‘at one goodman Mann his house at Thorpland’ in Norfolk in February 1661, where he accidentally left some taffety ribbon and an ounce of silk on the hall table. The poor had to make do with a quick job done in the tailor’s workshop. Joan Cowling ...”

“... concerning them manage to be as much about Schoenberg as anything else. Robert Simpson and Peter Maxwell Davies are given such occluded treatment that one might be forgiven for not recognising them at all. But it is the holes that I deplore. Bach is a pious shadow rather than a solid substance; the rest of the Baroque is altogether absent. So are whole ...”

“... who was responsible for the ridiculing of his father? Seventeenth-century clergymen such as Peter Heylyn veered between embracing the racial version of this story and dismissing it as ‘a foolish tale’. (Heylyn did both, at different moments in his life.) Some 19th-century commentators tripped on the awkward question of how stuffy old Noah had become ...”

“... early verse tales, The Giaour (1813), The Corsair (1814), Lara (1814) and others, have long been read as revealing in the worst way – reliant on ‘facile techniques’, uncommitted and unconvinced, marred in their judgments by a ‘fatal distaste for self-criticism’, as Philip Martin puts it. In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, the dodgy English professor ...”

“... photographs and things.Was there much reading going on in the house?By the time I was 16 I’d read every book in the house. There were popular boys’ books of an earlier time, for some reason: Henty, Ballantyne, that sort of thing. There were lots of self-educating books, home encyclopedias, home university courses, Pelmanism manuals, self-improvement ...”

“... was likely to spread. But it was too late to draw back easily; and in the end Prokofiev decided to read the situation in a positive light: Shostakovich might be a ‘formalist’, but he, evidently, was not; why else would the Soviets be wooing him? ‘In the months ahead,’ Morrison writes, ‘Prokofiev allowed himself to believe that, with Shostakovich ...”

“... rejected by our more powerful pundits of musical taste’ – Hans Keller, William Glock and Peter Heyworth. For someone like Keller, the gatekeeper of the debate about new music in the 1960s and 1970s, Cardew was a godsend: Keller might not agree with what he wrote, but he enjoyed orchestrating the subsequent controversy. Cardew became known not just as ...”

“... retired now but that’s what I was doing when I started writing this: I wrote and I waited to get Peter’s dinner out of the oven. Peter got 24-hour care, and I did three seven-hour shifts a week. I enjoyed the connectedness that working always gave me, the benchmarks at the end of every shift: pill box empty, kitchen ...”

“... the consigliore of radicalism, was master of ceremonies. Jack Kerouac, too self-conscious to read, acted as cheerleader: ‘Go! Go! Go!’ He passed out slopping gallon jugs of Californian Burgundy. There had been poetry readings in the Bay Area before this and the Six Gallery was hardly virgin territory. The space had once been a community art venture ...”

“... It was, Swartz and his friends wrote, ‘outrageous and unacceptable’ to make scientists pay to read the work of their colleagues, and disgraceful that students at elite universities have access to knowledge while those in the developing world have nothing. ‘We need to take information,’ they wrote, ‘wherever it is stored, make our copies and share ...”

“... more than a cosmetic choice. Displaying all the insouciant condescension of a Walpolean oligarch, Peter Mandelson mused that ‘the era of pure representative democracy is coming slowly to an end.’ Each party adopted the same techniques. If they were aware that they were making the political class look alien, uncaring and fake, there was no electoral ...”

“... is an authority on obscenity in Old Comedy – his book The Maculate Muse (1975) is a must-read in the field – and his versions include multiple instances of ‘pussy’ and ‘cock’; Poochigian mostly prefers ‘dick’ and ‘twat’. Though the Spartan Messenger in Lysistrata – whose dialect he translates into what he calls a ‘country twang ...”