“... time. Phoenix, who in 2006 was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar for his performance as Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, announced he was retiring from acting at the end of 2008. He grew long hair and a tangled beard, wore dark glasses constantly, tried to become a rapper and gave disobliging, monosyllabic interviews on chat shows. Last autumn he released ...”

“... partners in Washington and the Pentagon, for whom the collapse of the USSR threatened hard times. William Perry, an affable engineer who presided over the Pentagon for much of the Clinton era, was a firm believer in remote-control systems and encouraged continued investment in them even as the post-Cold War defence budget was being slashed. His approach ...”

“... won his Senate seat in New Jersey albeit only after having spent massive amounts of (his own) cash, they seem more like consolation prizes now, and make the apparent Bush win taste all the more sour. The other consolation, we are told (by the schoolteacherly Gore among others), is that the election was a great lesson in civics. With the popular count and ...”

“... the concordat that would guarantee continued single-family rule. The interpreter was Colonel William Eddy, a senior US intelligence officer and much else besides. Considered too insecure during the ‘global war on terror’, Suez was rejected as a potential venue for the re-enactment: the grandsons of the two principals and Eddy’s nephew had to make ...”

“... of the slaves sold for. The auctioneer announced the terms: buyers would pay one-third down in cash, with the remainder in interest-bearing instalments. The highest sum paid was $1750 for William, a carpenter – an immense amount at a time when the average working-class white person earned around $300 per ...”

“... as mercury: ‘Money in every pocket, no wallet, no clip/I just bunch it up and stuff it.’ Cash for Corso was always a dangerously occult commodity. ‘Money,’ he acknowledged, ‘doesn’t come with instructions.’ Corso of course is the other ‘drinky poo’ laureate. In his latest novel, Stormy Weather, Hiaasen takes less than a hundred pages to ...”

“... Carlo. By the time she got there, it was too late. He left her two million dollars. Flush with cash, Barney rented a house in Neuilly and started staging tableaux vivants in the garden; they often descended into orgies. During one such display, Mata Hari rode naked on a horse after Barney refused to let her bring an elephant. The neighbours complained and ...”

“... behind straggly beards and whiskers with sad, rheumy eyes – Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Swinburne, William Morris, Leslie Stephen, Tennyson – giving off a steamy despair. They had heard the melancholy long withdrawing roar of faith, and they did not like the sound of it. Today relegated to a wall in a side room, these literary men seem to take second billing ...”

“... the circle of those entitled to be known as ‘moral managers’ to encompass a much larger group: William Battie, Thomas Arnold, William Perfect, Joseph Mason Cox, Francis Willis, Benjamin Faulkner, William Pargeter, Thomas Bakewell, ...”

“... idea of literature, and a peculiar division of labour between writer and reader. Their author, William Gaddis, who won the National Book Award with JR, might actually have felt short-changed by the accolade of the imprint, to judge by a riff in JR deploring the way ‘longer works of fiction [are] now dismissed as classics and … largely unread due to the ...”

“... with a big infusion of aid from more than forty independent donor organisations – $30 million in cash and kind since the height of the drought – are bringing the EPLF steadily closer to its objective of a new social order. Since many of these receipts are earmarked for development projects rather than simple emergency food relief, the EPLF can also claim ...”

“... as Geneva – familiarised by British tipplers as ‘gin’ – was introduced by the Court of William of Orange in the 1690s. By the mid-18th century, a quarter of London’s population – almost exclusively from the poorer classes – had a gin habit averaging a pint a day. A survey of 1750 shows that every fourth house in the parish of St Giles was a ...”

“... oppressive monarchy, leading to the development of liberty for the individual under the law, and cash rather than service as the basis of transactions. At the same time the economic resources of the aristocracy encouraged the development of skilled manufacturing work, and hence prosperity for many sections of society. It all sounds fine provided you remember ...”

“... finding a place for transcendent values, must be the pursuit of English novelists.’ It is William Golding who comes top here: he has ‘wed his sense of a transcendent evil and good to the fully felt social novel that the English have constructed in their great tradition’. Few people will dissent, I imagine, from this rating of Mr Golding. It must ...”

“... but the retention of that power is probably the most indispensable element of success.’ Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, stated the contrary view a month later: ‘The attitude of some ministers is rather to find out what is the smallest amount of money and the smallest number of men with which we may hope, some day, to win ...”