“... The number is right.’ I heard him explain the discrepancy: ‘Now, are some getting killed every day? Sure. Are some retiring at various times or injured? Yes, they’re gone.’ I remembered that a year before he had said the number was 210,000. I heard the Pentagon announce it would no longer release Iraqi troop figures. I heard that 50,000 US soldiers in ...”

“... in certain constituencies, such as the famous Basildon; and c. keen readers of the Sun. On the day of the 1992 general election the Sun ran a headline saying: ‘IF KINNOCK WINS TODAY, WILL THE LAST PERSON TO LEAVE BRITAIN TURN OUT THE LIGHTS.’ After the result it ran another headline saying: ‘IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT.’ That was a joke, but from the ...”

“... for unspecified months, as an oversubscribed militia in sour yellow tabards retreat to their all-day breakfasts and tabloid-insulated Portakabins. By way of contrast, the lawn-despoilers initiated their modest project at the summer solstice, before returning every grain of soil, with willing volunteers, in October. One of those who went down into the pit ...”

“... to break the ice is that she is a woman doing a man’s job. 8 January. By train to Cambridge on a day of blinding sunshine and bitter cold. We eat our sandwiches on the train, a busy, bucketing electric job that scampers through Shepreth and Foxton and very different from the plodding little steam train I used to take into Cambridge when I was doing National ...”

“... worlds other than this; they are, of course, irritating for exactly the same reason.A call from Barry Cryer, who claims to have heard a woman outside Liberty’s saying to her husband: ‘Remind me to tell Austin that there is no main verb in that sentence.’15 January, Yorkshire. Trying to put my forty-year-old letters in order, I come across a diary for ...”

“... A coincidence: I wrote the first page of ‘It’ on St Patrick’s Day with Irish pipers tuning up down in the street 12 floors beneath. In the parade along 5th Avenue they carried banner portraits of Sean McDermott, Kevin Barry and, no doubt, other martyrs. I didn’t stay long because the wind was bitter, the pavement covered in slush and my bones frozen to the marrow ...”

“... I mean the distant past – and the books hardly matter, seem a strange irrelevance. On a busy day it is easy to go into the GPO in O’Connell Street without a single thought for MacDonagh and MacBride and Connolly and Pearse, or without remembering for a second that Samuel Beckett once asked his friend Con Leventhal to betake himself ‘to the Dublin ...”

“... in the downtown county jail. His offence was not wholly clear. The trouble began the previous day while he’d been in an overflow room at the state capitol listening in as a senate committee debated a bill to crack down on undocumented migrants. The gist of the bill was to make life impossible for anyone in Arizona without papers: impossible to drive a ...”

“... of the Shorncliffe Camp. I have no recollection of the sun shining during my sojourn there. Each day I walked to school and back past deserted, dusky parade-grounds – the occasional ghostly soldier in puttees looming up out of the mist. Except for a few barracks and the redbrick officer quarters, all dating from Napoleonic days, the place seemed largely ...”

“... dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!’ Immediately, Vanity Fair had its biggest one-day increase in subscriptions. Once again, Trump had foolishly exposed his thin skin. For him, Manhattan has always been the opposite of what home was for Robert Frost, ‘the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’ Wa-a-a-a-h!Winning ...”

“... journal’s 20th year – a Tatler-style spread awash with tuxedo and chalice, whose stars were Barry Goldwater (‘regarded more than any other living American with almost universal affection’) and Ronald Reagan (‘about to engage in a great enterprise – indeed this occasion is at once his last, and unlikeliest, chance to back out’). Peering out ...”

“... suggests that the Streak is all the more remarkable because DiMaggio could not afford ‘a single day of sub-par play, or even of bad luck’. But it is a little tendentious to suggest that a player who cannot afford to be unlucky even once is therefore operating outside the boundaries of chance altogether; a more straightforward way of putting it would be to ...”

“... determine what is good with an independence of judgment that was unimaginable in Weldon’s day’. As in the Health Service and education, consumer choice has succeeded in transforming the television service where the diktats of public servants failed. No longer bound by the tyranny of the schedule, tomorrow’s viewers will see television as a ...”

“... the Scientists for Johnson Campaign, run by a group of eminent scientists who were worried about Barry Goldwater’s apparent eagerness to wage nuclear war. Their campaign had a considerable impact, and when Richard Nixon got to the White House four years later he was convinced that scientists were a dangerously anti-Republican political lobby. Nixon shut ...”

“... too. But I still couldn’t concentrate. Something had to be done. I always knew she’d die some day and I always dreaded it and now it’s happened. So what? So where does one go from here? Nowhere. Stay put. If they’d only let one. If they’d only ... No, that isn’t the right beginning. Start again. From scratch. But where’s scratch? Ah, if one only ...”