“... hobble. When not on the phone, Sam talked into thin air, addressing himself. ‘Why did the Good Lord bring Hurricane Katrina?’ he asked. ‘Man, it’s life, it’s evolution. Shit happens. But the thing that matters is what you do about it as a person. If some guy comes to rape my wife, why, this is America: I’m gonna put a cap in his ass. I’m gonna ...”

“... can treat the patient for £1600, it keeps the difference. The incentive to send the patient home as soon as possible is high. Under the new system, state money will ‘follow the patient’ wherever the patient chooses to take it, even when that is outside the NHS. Patients with chronic conditions like diabetes will increasingly be given, not ...”

“... their respective nuclear arsenals. Thatcher used the promise of this event to drive her message home. Reagan, she insisted, could negotiate because he started from a position of strength. Kinnock’s strategy would toss all that away, or at least Britain’s chance of playing any meaningful role in the discussions. ‘Does anyone imagine that Mr Gorbachev ...”

“... as Mary Rowlandson did, reflecting on her past torments and ‘the awful dispensation of the Lord towards us’.A sanitised version of the captivity narrative, shorn of Rowlandson’s reflections, became the official story of post-9/11 America, as constructed by its leaders: the American people would be freed from their helpless vulnerability by ...”

“... he didn’t dislike them. I think I came in the latter category. I went round to see him after Home and he said how much he liked David Storey. ‘He’s the ideal author … never says a word!’ In Chariots of Fire he shared a scene with Lindsay Anderson, both of them playing Cambridge dons. Lindsay was uncharacteristically nervous but having directed ...”

“... to look after him. This detail comes from the only published account of the circumstances, by Lord Berners, who considered himself Firbank’s ‘only friend in Rome at the time’. In a brief memoir published four years later, he gives us the last recorded image of him alive. He describes how a few days earlier he had motored out with Firbank to Lake ...”

“... all come from ‘Consider This and in Our Time’, written in 1930, and may well be there to push home the message that we’re going to the dogs. But the staged apocalypse feels serendipitous, chancy, thrilling.Hardy, Eliot and Yeats loomed large in Auden’s pantheon, but he wasn’t about to be co-opted into anyone else’s story of tradition and the ...”

“... to this pageantry. With trepidation I asked a friend of mine whose judgment I trusted, a young lord, shortly to be killed, what I should do about all this. He said that if my family, which had evacuated itself, had no permanent address, it would be hard to get into the Brigade of Guards, but he strongly advised me to apply to the Inniskilling Dragoon ...”

“... with George W. Bush? Why did the highways to all men give way to those heavy fields in back of home? Christian Pentecostalists and Wahhabite Muslims alike think they know God, and that their particular boundaries are imbued with universal spirit and meaning. These boundaries must be fought for, plainly, rather than relying on mathematical reason for an ...”

“... June:He is as elusive as smoke. Restless and edgy, he paces around the marble floor of his Malibu home wondering why people are always curious about his private life, and isn’t it enough just to talk about his profession.Finally, Richard Gere settles into an armchair and remains motionless, staring straight ahead, his nobleman profile tilted ever so ...”

“... had a successful stint as an actor before alcoholism ended his career and forced him to return home. Snyder refers to him as ‘an aspiring actor and gay youth’ who felt stuck in a conservative Midwestern town, but there is no follow-up on this broad hint. The youngest brother, Robert, stayed in Ohio. James described him as a ‘Babbitt’ – a smug ...”

“... mother, or indeed their father. This idea that the sisters have to be removed from the family home for the novel to proceed makes the role of their uncle and aunt essential in the book. Austen feels free, on the other hand, to make Lady Catherine de Bourgh both imperious and comic, her wealth and power serving to make her ridiculous rather than ...”

“... for the Boat Race. Go via Midhurst to look at the Camoys tombs in St George’s Church, Trotton. Lord Camoys was a veteran of Agincourt where he commanded the left wing; he married Hotspur’s widow and both of them are buried in a massive and inconveniently placed tomb at the east end of the centre aisle, smack in front of the altar. There’s another much ...”

“... to protect what they see as the higher interests of the nation. Mubarak may have fled to his home on the Red Sea but activists continued to be followed by the same internal intelligence agents as before. Whatever was happening at the top, the deep state remained intact. When revolutionary protesters ransacked sensitive government offices, security ...”

“... authors. ‘By warding off the Jews,’ he said, quoting Hitler, ‘I struggle for the work of the Lord.’Still, the Nazis didn’t consider him tough enough, even when he came up with a legal basis for Germany’s territorial expansion. He fell from favour. After the war he was detained by the Americans and the Soviets, responded to interrogation with ...”