“... On the fourth floor of the original club at 40 Greek Street there was a button on the wall that one could press, late into the night, for another tray of whisky. Patrons bashed an old piano, and eccentrics came in every night, such as the wonderful Fay Presto, the queen of close-up magic. Fay was the magician at Langan’s Brasserie and she used ...”

“... blacksmiths, six undertakers, 45 lawyers and sixteen landladies, several magistrates, a weaver (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times), an umbrella-maker (Alexander Trott in Sketches by Boz), and many busy others. Today, workers in British novels are often vague figures, thin on the page and ghosts in society. Alarm clocks, crowded tube trains, horrible ...”

“... his ennobled former chancellor, Lord Darling, was on his way to work for Morgan Stanley in Wall Street. Blair, an adviser to J.P. Morgan since 2008, must have chuckled. At last, a New Labour reunion in the land of the free. All that ‘light-touch’ regulation was bearing rich fruit. Virtually every senior member of the Blair and Brown cabinets went ...”

“... the duct, first acquiring the power to disrupt the arrangement of the cells that form the duct wall. It can then invade the surrounding tissue and infiltrate the lymphatic system (the network of capillaries and ducts that recycles blood plasma to the heart), finally colonising vital organs. One of the difficulties with breast cancer screening is that about ...”

“... as Phillips puts it, is the ‘latrinalia’ of popular culture: the writing on the toilet wall. Trolls are also distinguished from their predecessors by seeming not to recognise any limits. Ridicule is an anti-social force: it tends to make people clam up and stop talking. So there is a point at which, if conversation and community are to ...”

“... remind us of Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’: A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead … In an earlier poem, ‘On Woman’, Yeats had associated the harshness of the desire between Solomon and Sheba with the explosive shudder of iron moved from fire and plunged into water. That is an ...”

“... reasons (as, along with ITV, it would have rejected last year’s Bafta-winning single drama, the Stephen Frears/ Peter Morgan dramatisation of the Blair/ Brown relationship, The Deal). Despite Born’s claim that recent British TV drama had ‘a low tolerance for formal innovation’, many of the innovative devices associated with high-art drama are now ...”

“... these lines were tumbling off the presses: a symposium entitled International Regimes, edited by Stephen Krasner (1983); Keohane’s own treatise, After Hegemony (1984); and a host of learned articles.In the following decade this reassuring doctrine underwent a mutation, with the publication of a volume entitled Regime Changes: Macroeconomic Policy and ...”

“... for the third inspirational flash. He went where the action was, whether that was Los Alamos or Wall Street. He invented games theory and made a lot of money explaining it to bankers and brokers. He was also the first to develop (and may have been the first to conceive – the history is obscure) a programmable computer. The first major task given the ...”

“... ahead, or just pulling back entirely to register what Vince De Luca has aptly called Blake’s ‘wall of words’. Nor is spatial reading in Blake simply a function of those plates with large or dramatic illustrations. Those extraordinary plates in Milton and Jerusalem which are filled from top to bottom with packed lines of seriatim verse are every bit as ...”

“... should ever be inflicted upon anyone,’ bemoaned the eminent Victorian jurist, James Fitzjames Stephen, ‘shocks and scandalises people in these days.’ Assessment, as Rey recognises, is tricky. Does the founding of Amnesty International testify to the intensified moral conscience of our century or to the fact that torture is now more brazen than ...”

“... John Huston to come out to Hollywood in the summer of 1950 to write about his adaptation of Stephen Crane’s novel The Red Badge of Courage. She just stuck with the project from beginning to end. If you know how to report in a certain way, by seeing people and circumstances as you might see them if you were writing a novel, then access becomes a daily ...”

“... churches or other public buildings. Just to the left of the main entrance to the cathedral of St Stephen in Vienna are two iron bars embedded in the wall – the linen ell and the shorter drapery ell. If you were a visitor and wanted to know local standards, or if you wanted to check your local rules against the ...”

“... But this was a prettified version of history. The Lithuanians had at first run into a wall of hatred from the Scottish working class who perceived them, not entirely without reason, as cheap foreign labour brought in to collapse miners’ wages. The Italian community was utterly unprepared for the ferocious anti-Italian riots which flamed through ...”

“... felt completely unselfconscious.’ Then there is Tommy or Tommie or Tony Hyndman, also a lover of Stephen Spender’s (who calls him Jimmy Younger in World within World) and a character in T.C. Worseley’s autobiographical novel Fellow Travellers (Worseley calls him Harry Watson). But Strachan’s intention is always to give Redgrave the benefit of his own ...”