“... only at the end of a book, but throughout. Wilde pushed his luck by refusing to gratify them. W.H. Smith retaliated by pulling the issue of Lippincott’s that contained the story from the shelves of its stores. ‘Dullness and dirt,’ the Daily Chronicle declared in its review. Dorian was ‘a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the ...”

“... set in an ultra-violent 19th-century gold-rush town in Indian territory, outside US jurisdiction, drew a committed audience, critical love and big prizes until HBO pulled the plug, probably for financial reasons. Biskind picks it out, with its grandiloquent, high frequency cussing, its corpse count and its brutal bordello – and its longer story arc, about a ...”

“... members of TCBS were killed on the Western Front: Rob Gilson on the first day of the Somme, G.B. Smith from shell wounds a few months after. ‘My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight . . . there will still be left a member of the great TCBS to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon,’ Smith had ...”

“... flooded and the walls were wet with damp. When they spent part of the summer of 1919 there, Yeats drew an idyllic picture for his father. ‘It may well be,’ William Murphy later wrote in his biography of Yeats’s father, ‘that one of the happiest days of his life was 16 July 1919. Fishing in the stream by the tower, with George sewing and “Anne lying ...”

“... up into a watchtower and asked the ANA soldier on guard what had happened to the Taliban. He drew his finger across his throat and laughed. A Brit told me the man had been executed, but another said he’d been taken to the nearest base and arrested. It’s often hard to know what to believe, as British soldiers are given LTTs (‘lines to take’) when ...”

“... or hangers-on. Both men were on horseback. They met near a stream. Without warning, naughty Fateh drew his sword, and with a single superbly executed blow, severed his older brother’s head from his body. The mare on which the slain man was riding galloped back with the decapitated body to the stables on his estate. The feud started there. The widow ...”

“... electricity companies’ minuscule debts and the fat profits they were making under RPI-X drew predators from across the Atlantic, and when the government’s golden share in the firms lapsed in 1995, the Americans pounced. Just as California was making the disastrous decision to imitate the British model in opening up its own electricity system to ...”

“... and also get, a hit of solid senior-common-room emollience.The lifelong strength that Berlin drew from his 1917 baptism was, however, often applied in less obvious ways. I was fascinated to learn, from Ignatieff, that his Latvian family had a direct kinship with the Schneerson clan who ran, and still run, the fanatical sect known as Lubavitch or ...”

“... less tolerant towards ‘Rome’, was less solidly home-grown in inspiration. John Knox’s church drew its theological ideas from constant European travel, the movement of black-clad divines between Edinburgh and the Calvinist centres in Geneva, the Netherlands and Germany.The third attempt to turn the white cliffs into a red line is the farce we are watching ...”

“... Martin, taking a card out of the folder, ‘there was this.’ It was a sheet torn from the Delia Smith Cookery Calendar with a recipe for the hotpot which Mrs Ransome had made that afternoon and which she had left in the oven. On the back of it was written: ‘Leave exactly as it is,’ then in brackets, ‘but feel free to use.’ This was ...”

“... planes?’ She recited the shahadah. ‘The fire is coming up. There is no God but Allah.’ She drew back from the window to speak to one of her children. Her breath grew shorter with panic and she continued to pray. ‘Oh, Allah. I seek refuge from sudden death. The police are saying to get out, the whole building is burning and we are on the top floor. To ...”