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“... it was entirely in character that on her husband’s becoming Prelate of the Order of St Michael and St George she adopted the style of an (honorary) knight’s wife, though she had no right to it – was not wise in the management of a tough little boy and systematically denied him any display of love at all. Her own fortunes in love had been ...”

“... in secondary schools and then at Queen’s; his literary life with Seamus Deane, Derek Mahon, Michael and Edna Longley, Philip Hobsbaum, and the workshop that Hobsbaum convened, the Group; and the grisly metamorphoses of Northern Irish public life, from simmering inequality and half-suppressed resentment into the worst of the Troubles. Each of these ...”

“... By 1987, with Militant and the miners beaten from the Mersey to the Humber, Thatcher’s ally Lord Young could afford to be more direct: ‘the two present growth industries – the City and tourism – are concentrated in the South. It’s our turn, that’s all.’Musgrove’s survey The North of England, published three years later, gave a sweeping and ...”

“... good way. A single mother, she had to give up her bookkeeping job so she could look after her two young daughters. Now she has a small flower-selling business she can run largely from home. Her little bungalow at the end of Sheepshead Bay has flowers everywhere: lilies in the bath, roses in the kitchen sink, hyacinths in pots and pans. It’s a surprisingly ...”

“... knows, the relief of that, the pub, the slope down into Newman Passage, the opening sequence of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a puddle of bloody neon, awkward stone setts, smokers in doorways; and then out, immediately, into another world, Newman Street. Black leather, chrome, complimentary coffee. Film, television, advertising. Bikers with ...”

“... descendant of the parrot given to Shakespeare in 1610 as a gift by his friend and fellow poet Michael Drayton. The Bard was exceedingly fond of the bird, and would speak to her as one might write in a journal – to chronicle, reflect and confess. When he died of fever six years later, Anne Hathaway kept the parrot, and introduced into its cage a younger ...”

“... the first African-American nominee, but rather to deride, with soporific sarcasm, Obama the young whippersnapper and his belief in ‘change’. A bizarre line from McCain’s speech has already become a six-second YouTube classic: ‘We should be able to deliver bottled hot water to dehydrated babies.’ Watching Obama speak, I found it hard to believe ...”

“... his various capacities as think-tank director, Daily Telegraph leader-writer and speechwriter for Michael Howard, he has been agitating against the United Kingdom’s membership of the EU throughout the 25 years since he was a student politician at Oxford. As an MEP he helped persuade David Cameron to withdraw the Tories from the conservative-liberal ...”

“... early, so that by 12.45 I’m back home. It’s a model service, today’s radiographer a bearded young man who asks about Allelujah!, and shows me the screen and how he measures the width of my (quite small) aneurysms. Good young medics always cheer me and offer hope, not for my future but for the world in general.19 ...”

“... though one of her legs was two and a half inches shorter than the other. In the 1930s, the young Alan Turing went skinny-dipping off the rocks, photographed by an enthusiastic housemaster.Sark’s appeal remains its rugged coastal scenery, sunshine, peacefulness, birds, butterflies, dolphins and absence of carbon monoxide. Artists have come for 150 ...”

“... When​ I was young I thought poetry and poetry anthologies could change the world. ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry was ‘My passport’s green ...”

“... shabab first,’ answered Wadie, ‘but we’ll have to wait till the afternoon.’ The shabab (‘young men’) are Wadie’s wards, a group of six young Gaza men, most of them Ibrahim’s former students at Bir Zeit, now living illegally on the West Bank. It is one of the many ironies of the peace process that Palestinians ...”

“... to put his own spin on the tragedy – and, indeed, on the romance. Within days of the car crash, Michael Cole – al-Fayed’s ultra-Brit PR man – was feeding the newspapers sugary tidbits from the couple’s final hours. Diana, he said, had given Dodi a pair of cufflinks that had once belonged to her father. Dodi had responded with a ‘Tell me ...”

“... Already by the turn of the 1960s, it was paying less attention to these than the levy of young radicals who would go on to produce the peculiarly Italian phenomenon of operaismo, one of the strangest intellectual adventures of the European left of the period.* Unlike the PCI, the postwar PSI had possessed at least one major figure, Rodolfo ...”

“... art and literature. He might also be called ridiculous. Nobody was more warmly encouraging to any young writer or painter who promised to transcend the bounds of everyday life. In the Forties he was excited by the rattling rhetoric of the Apocalyptic poets, believing that the day of Audens and MacNeices was over, that poetry ‘must now be positive and ...”