“... his siblings – made a fortune as a builder after Rome became the capital of a unified Italy. The young Roberto led the life of a playboy. He dropped out of high school and ‘spent money on cars, flowers, women and clothes’, Gallagher tells us. ‘He took twenty or thirty people to supper every night. A lot of money he gave away casually.’ Before he was ...”

“... this systematically and over a period of time. Some time after Walsingham’s death, his colleague Robert Beale recalled that he had engaged ‘some’ of the secretaries in the French Embassy to betray the secrets of French and Scottish ‘dealings’, which was to say, the convolution at the heart of mid-Elizabethan politics: the question of Mary Queen of ...”

“... Davidian, and rushed back to tell everyone. When Jones got to the compound, Koresh was talking to Robert Rodriguez, an ATF agent who had gone undercover as a Davidian. Rodriguez left the building and informed his superiors, but they decided to go ahead with the raid anyway. By the time the ATF team arrived at the compound at around 9.40 a.m., the Davidians ...”

“... system, or stardust. The electrical wires of the nerves, the mainframe of the brain. We start young: my train-obsessed three-year-old thinks of his digestive tract as a track, as if it were a series of signalling booths and stations. Why not? Is this metaphor any less apt than memory as data storage, or the immune system as besieged city? Something ...”

“... off. It’s a good service, a model, with none of the speakers – his two sons, Richard Eyre and Robert Bathurst – outstaying their welcome and Ben vividly recalled.Bathurst is particularly good, reading a Betjeman poem about golf, following it up with a very funny (and almost better) poem in parody by Ben himself. Since I know him chiefly from ...”

“... collaborators (which Camus supported) and the execution of fascist sympathisers such as the writer Robert Brasillach (which he opposed). With the start of the Cold War, the always precarious alliance between the communist and non-communist left was beginning to crumble. Camus was fretting, too, about his native Algeria, ‘pacified’ by the army after a ...”

“... the McCarthy hearings, in Dallas, in Vietnam, over Watergate and in the discovery (celluloided by Robert Redford in Quiz Show) that the TV contests in the Eisenhower era were fixed. This list is not exhaustive. Innocence, we were recently and quakingly informed, was lost again at the bombing of Oklahoma City. Clearly, a virginity so casually relinquished is ...”

“... in addition to the extraordinary public fervour that surrounds them. Two innocents, two girls too young to know what they were doing when they did what most radically determined their lives, two female figures hounded by the press, two women whose physical attributes seem to be an essential component of their appeal, two women accused of being ...”

“... traders and saying, “Buy it, I don’t care what the price is, buy it,”’ one attendee told Robert Bryce. As New York closes, the announcement comes. Enron, which began by owning pipelines carrying natural gas, is going to organise the trading of ‘bandwidth’ (capacity) in pipelines that carry information, the fibre-optic cables of the Internet. At ...”

“... different from an ‘Atlantis’ reconstructed on a Bahamian beach or the fake ruins of Hubert Robert, both of which she gives as examples of kitsch, just because one is real, the others fake, one melancholic, the others nostalgic? Both categories of object seem to me to trade on the viewer’s engrained sentiments and predictable responses. In this ...”

“... you wrote that novel,’ a psychoanalyst told him. ‘If you hadn’t, you might have murdered a young woman.’ (Robbe-Grillet would often cite this diagnosis with approval; he enjoyed his role as the resident psychopath in the republic of letters.) Olga Bernal, one of Robbe-Grillet’s most perceptive early interpreters (he had an army of them when the ...”

“... too, but the war made its way into the nervous system of her poems indirectly and mysteriously. Robert Lowell was a high-profile conscientious objector, writing to Roosevelt in September 1943 with a ‘Declaration of Personal Responsibility’ which objected to the mining of the Ruhr Dams and the bombing of Hamburg. He concluded: In 1941 we undertook a ...”

“... Butler, in Gosse. It is especially prominent in Ireland. George Moore, in his Confessions of a Young Man, blatantly proclaims his sense of liberation and relief when his father died. Synge makes an attempted parricide the theme of his Playboy of the Western World; James Joyce describes in Ulysses how Stephen Dedalus, disowning his own parent, searches for ...”

“... add up to, what your aunt’s position in the world means. You could (and do) know that your young friend lacks culture, needs to broaden her horizon by travel. You could (and later do) know that she is ill. You could (and do) know that you yourself are ill. You could (and nearly everybody in the book does) know a particular fact or set of facts, a ...”

“... to lift themselves above it will make one another as miserable as people ever could. The bland young orphan Thomasin, ‘a pleasing and innocent woman’, is timid and sensible in all things except her determination to marry the shifty Mr Wildeve, almost the only eligible bachelor on the heath. Wildeve is a qualified engineer who for reasons never ...”