“... A woman threw her glass of wine at me,’ James Lasdun’s second novel begins. At a party held by a wealthy philanthropist in New York, a woman walks up to the narrator and asks: ‘Excuse me, are you Stefan Vogel?’ He says yes; she flings her wine in his face. In keeping with the novel’s mood of dreamlike self-absorption, the event is replayed many times ...”

“... After the attacks of 11 September 2001, Cheney assembled a crack team of White House lawyers, David Addington, Timothy Flanigan and Alberto Gonzales, with support from John Yoo at the Justice Department, who set about granting the president as many extraordinary powers as Cheney thought he needed. First up was intercepting, without a ...”

“... its towns and cities, the rumpled skin of lowland Britain is covered and pierced in many ways, by church steeples, nuclear reactors, safari parks, six-lane highways, ruined monasteries, radio telescopes, wind turbines, landfill sites, golf courses. Mostly, though, it’s a patchwork of oblongs of open ground stretching to the horizon, blocks of single ...”

“... unexpected building in Port Glasgow is a castle – Newark Castle, inherited in the 17th century by the Maxwell family, who turned it from an austere tower house into what the guidebook calls a Renaissance mansion. The Clyde rises and falls only a few yards from the castle’s back door, and in 1668 Sir George Maxwell sold eighteen acres of riparian land to ...”

“... in 1946, two years before his death, Sergei Eisenstein declared that he had ‘been fascinated by bones and skeletons since childhood’. His first experience of film involved watching a flying skeleton horse pull a bewitched carriage across the sky, in Georges Méliès’s Les 400 Farces du diable. It was skeletons, he says, that made him go to Mexico: I ...”

“... so he later wanted us to believe). In his case, it is not clear which outcome should more properly be regarded as failure: ‘winning’ at Russian roulette could be seen as condemning him to more years of unbearable boredom. A typical character from one of his novels would presumably have put the gun to his head but been ...”

“... magic disappears if the audience knows how the trick is done, so the credibility of scholars can be sharply diminished if readers learn everything about how exactly their books came to be written. Only too often, such revelations dispel the impression of fluent, confident omniscience; instead, they suggest that histories ...”

“... World War, my overriding impression was of a man both broad-minded and cosmopolitan; fascinated by the infinite varieties of human nature; surprisingly alert to the influence of women in history, which I’ve always thought of as the subtext, by no means always sexual, of so much public action; appreciative of ...”

“... Part​ of what makes Owen Jones such a phenomenally successful figure by left-of-Labour standards is his ability to be several things at once. He is both insider, reporting back to ‘us’ about what ‘they’ think, and outsider, as shocked and angry about it as ‘we’ might be ...”

“... reviewer said, ‘a children’s book only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery’. It was to be compared to Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, as belonging to ‘a very small class of books which have nothing in common save that each admits us to a world of its own’. The ...”

“... Eighty years​ have gone by. But there’s still no agreement on how the Spanish Civil War should be remembered. Nor should there be. The real tribute to the force of that human firestorm is the contest of judgments and feelings which still smoulders and still causes pain ...”

“... Foule’ (‘The Crowd’). It wasn’t actually new, having been composed in 1936 in Spanish by Angel Cabral, an Argentinian, using the form of a vals criollo, a dance favoured by the Peruvian working class. Piaf heard it and asked one of her librettists, Michel Rivgauche, to compose new French lyrics. It isn’t hard ...”

“... Salman in 2015 was cautiously welcomed but what really raised hopes that the PR nightmare could be ended was the appearance in the limelight of his son Mohammed, known as MBS. Was this the serious, young and energetic reformer the kingdom needed? After he was elevated to the highest positions in government – defence minister, first deputy prime ...”

“... and I’m part of it,’ he said about the thrill of Hollywood in its heyday; the compulsion to be near the hot centre never left his restless heart. Somehow he was always in the frame, writing his name on the barbarous history of his times. ‘Clancy was here’ was the motive for his writing, as his widow, Janice Tidwell, astutely observes in her ...”

“... unexplained halts in cold places, but forward. Prewar had been better, in ways which couldn’t be recovered (so my own family thought). But somewhere ahead, as the train began again to crawl across the grey plain of the 1950s, there would be warmth, light, undreamed-of gadgets, houses with inside toilets for all, travel ...”