“... preferred image of itself. The figure made its first, understated appearance in March 2010, when Andrew Haldane, the Bank’s Executive Director for Financial Stability, included it in a talk in Hong Kong, then reappeared later that year in a chart buried at the back of the December issue of the Bank’s Financial Stability Report. The figure was the size of ...”

“... a tailored jacket and jeans, with a blue-edged pocket square in his breast pocket, a scarf and brown brogue boots. He was 47 but looked about 29. There was something studied about him – the Alexander McQueen scarf, the lawyerly punctilio – and I’d never met anyone who spoke so easily about such large sums of money. When I asked him the point of the ...”

“... the genre in his ‘Epistle to Burlington’), but on another level Defoe is again thinking of Andrew Marvell: I descended a little on the side of that delicious vale, surveying it with a secret kind of pleasure (tho’ mixt with my other afflicting thoughts) to think that this was all my own, that I was king and lord of all this country indefeasibly, and ...”

“... for some states to spend 0.7 per cent of GDP on aid. Others are still up for debate. Gordon Brown recently revived the idea of abolishing the House of Lords. One of Benn’s biggest goals was realised in 2020, when the UK left the EU.The 1983 manifesto was so long and so Bennite because of the party’s right. John Golding, self-described ‘hammer of ...”

“... with plastic bowls of fruit at £1 a throw. The single gold coin is the dominant unit of exchange; brown tokens are trodden into tarmac like cigarette stubs or used gum. The blue wall carries a CORONET sign as a reminder of the building’s history. The ABC Cinema (as it was originally called) opened in 1932 as a 2000-seat Art Deco conversion of the former ...”

“... lowered. Wholly and proudly conventional writers and critics, such as Ruth Padel, Fiona Sampson, Andrew Motion and Peter McDonald, have found positive things to say. Last year Prynne received a Society of Authors award. The publication of the collected Poems in 1999, an ever fattening volume updated in 2005 and again last year, each time gathering in new ...”

“... churning up dust. In vast, windowless sheds specialising in Logistics. In geometric stacks of red, brown and blue containers: HAMBURG SÜD, HANJIN, MOL. Like a monumental Paul Klee hammered out in steel. In Thatcher’s day it seemed a ground-level manifestation of what I took to be her vision of enterprise: deranged scams, small businesses wiped out. And the ...”

“... You don’t need, and could hardly have, a point or a plot. Then two things happen. Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber miss a very easy shot, a chance to do something interesting without trying, even within the confines of the genre; and Alan Parker caves into the idea of death. You think those long closing scenes are going to be about Eva Perón dying, but ...”

“... modern translators excel – and I must allow that they really do excel – in an opposite manner. Andrew Miller does Paul the Silentiary, Tony Harrison does Palladas and Humphrey Clucas does Catullus into a harsh but wholly English English which is true to the fiercely direct sexuality of the originals. We in the 20th century can do what Pope, with all his ...”

“... out’ from his fan base to achieve genuine bestsellerdom. The book owes a great deal to Andrew O’Hagan’s The Missing, a debt acknowledged by the dedication of Rankin’s next novella, Death Is Not the End, the following year. O’Hagan’s book told the story of a murderer known as Bible John whose deeds and, just as important, whose legend ...”

“... its ‘racial and cultural homogeneity’ with ‘strict barriers against further immigrations of Brown, Black and Yellow peoples’. The first barrier on the US-Mexico border, Grandin notes, was constructed from wire that had surrounded the camps where Japanese Americans were interned during the Second World War. In the second book, Freedom’s Dominion: A ...”

“... subtle array, this … motile configuration’ of ‘grey in grey’. Gillian, to my memory, wore brown on brown, a thin brown polo-neck with a brownish waistcoat and some sort of brown and ordinary boots and skirt. Her hair was long and fair and ...”

“... judicious account of Nabokov’s life in the States, and, post-Lolita, in Montreux. Disposing of Andrew Field, his predecessor in the field, Brian Boyd cites his insolent, perfunctory response to one of Nabokov’s factual corrections. Told an event had taken place in July and not on ‘a wet autumnal day’, Field emended the phrase to ‘a wet autumnal day ...”

“... there was an increasing homogeneity of casting (the ‘anything with Tara Fitzgerald’ syndrome). Andrew Davies withdrew his adaptation of Angela Lambert’s A Rather English Marriage from the BBC when Alan Yentob insisted that an aristocratic ex-Battle of Britain pilot be played by David Jason; ITV loved it, but made similar demands. Eventually, back at the ...”

“... while Second Street itself saw better days some time ago. The Borden house – see ‘Andrew J. Borden’ in flowing script on the brass plate next to the door – stands by itself with a few scant feet of yard on either side. On the left is a stable, out of use since he sold the horse. In the back lot grow a few pear trees, laden at this ...”