“... I was going to eat that disgusting food. Soon everyone else had finished theirs. I noticed that David Driver had a boiled egg and some toast. It looked delicious. On the other hand, David had muscular dystrophy which was going to kill him soon anyway, which must have been why he was excused pilchards and likewise ...”

“... to visit the animals: ‘Meet your brothers, take them to your hearts and respect them.’ But as David Hancocks colourfully describes, most precursors of the modern zoo have been the opposite of this, from the circuses of Rome to the travelling menageries of the 18th and 19th centuries, shuttered in so that passers-by got no free view; and as he says (and I ...”

“... munitions which sprayed thousands of bomblets (Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions with a steel fragmentation case and an armour-piercing charge inside). More than a hundred casualties were treated at the al-Hilla hospital and 38 Iraqis, including several children, were reported to have been killed. It was the first killing of a large number of ...”

“... hooliganism but by football’s political desire to react to hooliganism by erecting unforgiving steel cages which became coffins’, Colin Ward writes in All Quiet on the Hooligan Front (1996). Lord Justice Taylor produced his interim report on the tragedy on 1 August that year. The chief superintendent in charge, Taylor decided, ‘could not face the ...”

“... them? Step forward the ideal type Sennett calls Jane Schwartz: ‘grey-haired, with a rasping, steel-cutting Bronx accent … slumped in her chair, chewing gum, her gaze wandering’. She is ‘not motherly’. Mrs Schwartz is a job counsellor, a pioneer in the skills of handling disappointment and lowered expectation that Sennett sees as necessary to the ...”

“... than sixty galleries, at a cost of $450 million. Roughly half of this great sum came from the late David Rockefeller, longtime chairman of the board (his mother, Abby, was a co-founder of the museum), and the other half from just four people: the hedge fund billionaires Leon Black, Kenneth Griffin and Steven Cohen, and the media mogul ...”

“... the field seldom went away unimpressed. Short in stature, with bony cheeks and long, sharp nose, steel-blue eyes and a precise, relentlessly logical mind, this captain of men imparted an aura of clarity and conviction which infused all who served under him.’ That is fair. That is right. That was ...”

“... engineer explained that the station’s four walls had been fastened to the dock floor by long steel piles, driven into the ground using a hydraulic rig – hydraulic, rather than the more common (and cheaper) diesel-powered hammers, so that the piles went in silently and didn’t disturb Canary Wharf’s delicate financiers. The man from World Tunnelling ...”

“... Objectivism is also promulgated by the Objectivist Center in Washington DC, until recently run by David Kelley, the author of A Life of One’s Own: Individualism and the Welfare State. Kelley split from the ARI in 1990, ‘dismayed’ by ‘the exploding excesses’ of its ‘official, dogmatic approach’. The Center supports lectures and social events, a ...”

“... as if they’d just been done with Persil in a boil wash. One of those long summer days, my friend David and I got caught after stealing powdered floor cleaner from the local supermarket and pouring a huge mound of it in a doorway. The manager went in search of our mothers and made them pay for our strange artwork. They brought buckets, ...”

“... his Irishness, but the editors of this new edition of Goldsmith’s letters, Michael Griffin and David O’Shaughnessy, urge its importance, and they are surely right. Some of the ideas that persistently recur in Goldsmith’s work – opposition to imperialism, scepticism about English notions of liberty – seem to be manifestations of his nationality. He ...”

“... helps to have a dad who was a bit (or more than a bit) of a rogue, as, variously, Greer, Ackerley, David Cornwell (a.k.a. John le Carré) and Tobias Wolff did. Ackerley’s left two letters, ‘to be read only in the case of my death’, in which he revealed his ‘secret orchard’: the mistress and three daughters he’d been hiding for many ...”

“... lined with rubbish, through an architectural jumble of slatted wood, rough concrete, padlocked steel doors; then climbed past anonymous compounds ringed with razor wire, around dirt bends where derelict-looking houses loomed above the road on iron stilts. By the time I reached my hotel, six hours after landing, the 18th century seemed more remote than ...”

“... and an eagerly embraced opportunity for the people who’ve written books on the phenomenon. Like David Kalat’s A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series (1997) and Steve Ryfle’s feebly named Japan’s Favourite Mon-Star (1998), William Tsutsui’s Godzilla on My Mind profits from the haziness of most people’s recollections by ...”

“... 2300 soldiers, Bastion will soon be able to hold 4500. The materials being used – concrete and steel rather than plastic and tent fabric – leave no doubt that we intend to be here for decades to come. As I queued for food outside one of the three huge scoff tents, a soldier told me that we were achieving nothing here, that this is not our fight, just ...”