“... but only those within an eighty-metre reach of her own house (the length of the camera’s power cable). The result is a social portrait of ‘a certain way of life in a certain year in a certain cluster of houses’. There’s the clockmaker who dreams of clocks that are difficult to mend. The butcher who pares fat with the deftness of a painter at a ...”

“... and the boys. Trophies in whose glow the Sussex poetaster could bask, quietly absorbing their power.) But how much more interesting it would be, I thought, to discover in some south coast junkshop an engraved and finished copy of Blake’s Ackroyd. It isn’t fair to see Ackroyd as a Hayley, of whom Gilchrist, in his 1863 life of Blake, said: ‘whatever ...”

“... Its most famous director, Yuri Grigorovich, who ruled the Bolshoi for 30 years, was prised from power in 1994. He was opposed by many of his leading performers, though not by the majority of the staff, who liked a conservative regime: more important, he failed to get backing from the Kremlin (which continues to have the last word where the Bolshoi is ...”

“... was one man [there] at that time, who had read Mein Kampf’. Indeed, Hitler’s rise to power made virtually no impression at all on the ‘defenders of the realm’, except as an opportunity to expand the franchise on anti-communist surveillance. To this end, officers of Special Branch – the ‘arms and legs’ of MI5 – monitored all entries to ...”

“... linguistic belonging starts at the regional level rather than the national, and where political power lies not with the nation-state but with the regions and provinces. When people talk of Belgium and Belgians, they need to specify which Belgians. Words like ‘patriotism’, ‘control’ and ‘sovereignty’ mean very different things in a country less ...”

“... her playmates to the children of Harvard professors. As an infant, she was placed in the arms of Henry David Thoreau (apparently he couldn’t tell which end of the baby was which).In 1877, she met David Todd, a ‘blond with magnificent teeth’, who was then working in Washington alongside the distinguished astronomer Simon Newcombe. Her parents had ...”

“... and was built on the site of the old thatched cathedral. It must have carried the great weight of power and newness which factories had in more industrial landscapes. It was where people first learned to remain quiet in large groups, and where they learned about being on time. Until the recent restoration I had never imagined the colour: people must have been ...”

“... some way influenced the nation’s life’, this would require the inclusion not only of Henry Ford and Walt Disney, but also of the CEOs of most big American corporations in the past century. This is one of the several ways in which one runs up against the limitations, for the purposes of historical understanding, of taking individual lives and ...”

“... had to be warned off, kept at bay. I desired the hitherto unattainable – to be left alone: what Henry James once described as ‘uncontested possession of the long, sweet, stupid day’: that peace to which no living creature has a natural right. Yes, for a time I was decidedly neurotic on the subject of my friends. I even imagined a kinship with Dorothy ...”

“... to rise even further under Liz Truss), so this should be easy enough. But the SNP has held power in Scotland for fifteen years and has its own list of embarrassments, notably in the areas of public health, education and industrial policy. Compared to low life expectancy, the highest rate of drug-related deaths in Europe and the near total foreign ...”

“... of the far West, and this was gun play with real live rounds of ammunition: John Ford, John Wayne, Henry Hathaway and the Colt, legendary instrument of masculine power and decisiveness. The general’s impromptu movie was a good deal more exciting than the twenty-minute one that we were actually filming. At dinner that ...”

“... he was ‘fundamentally a weak character’, only enabled to act at all by virtue of the will-power supplied by drugs. Carpenter tends to some extent, having recounted all this, to brush it aside, as he does also the question of neurosis in Auden – choosing to give little space to the subject of the poet’s parents, and his relation with them. These ...”

“... rouge, the point of ‘stretching’ a short passage of dialogue, or a scene, was to heighten its power, and slow down time. Melville’s acts of ‘dilation’ sometimes seem superfluous, even perverse, only to acquire meaning later on, like the languorous shot in Le Cercle rouge of a barmaid handing a red rose to Corey, the robber played by Delon, just ...”

“... the values recover) in whatever way makes the most possible money for the taxpayer. Nobody in power wants to do that. Nobody with power in the banking system, and nobody with power in government. Both the British and the American plans to help the banks are very, very, very expensive ...”

“... belonged more obviously to the geographical than the legal side of my project. Here was what Henry James called ‘the handsome side of the continent’, tawny and rugged and heroic. Driving through it with my US passport in my pocket (where I kept it at all times), I felt something avid and proprietorial, and I realised that this too, this purely ...”