“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to John Deaton, and was committed for trial. James Ryall, John Burridge, John White and Thomas Wall were re-examined for passing counterfeit coin but were discharged for lack of evidence. The last man up, Joseph Greenfield, was remanded till Monday for stealing a quantity of nails, ‘the property of some person unknown’. The only man who had not ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a police constable, later identified as James Scottow, go over to him. Peach was leaning against a wall and Scottow, who said he thought Peach was hiding from the police charge, shouted at him to move on. (A police internal investigation found that, given the ‘confusion and general tension’, Scottow had not neglected his duty towards Peach.) Peach was ...”

“... by a famous general and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, by a decent preponderance of Wall Street, and by the mainstream media, whose resources he deploys and channels with a relentlessness no other president has approached. Barack Obama, in the first 392 days of his presidency, put himself on public view for ...”

“... Englishman and a brilliant ship’s captain but a blunderer on land, strikes up a friendship with Stephen Maturin, an introverted Irish-Catalan doctor whom he takes aboard as a surgeon. There are naval battles and lengthy explanations of different types of sail and other nautical details. But the plotting – at least in a narrow, screenwriterly sense – is ...”

“... of all nations, but Russia in particular, are the movers in that market, and Trump’s credit on Wall Street ran out long ago. Russian money is probably behind some of his precarious loans; and the Russian government keeps track of Russian money. But the US media, and a great many Democrats with them, have been running far ahead of the game and treating the ...”

“... the legends of Faust and Don Juan) to symbolise the ascending and falling fortunes of Juan, Stephen and Bloom. This notion of the comprehensiveness of art derives from idealists like F.H. Bradley, and Hermione de Almeida’s aesthetic principles have much in common with those of Pound and Eliot. They belong in an intellectual ambience appropriate for ...”

“... seems to amount to a solid confirmation of the Blood for Oil argument: the Iraq invasion was, the Wall Street Journal said, ‘one of the most audacious hostile takeovers ever’. Perhaps, but the argument is multi-layered and sometimes inconsistent. Blood for Oil could mean that the war was a response to oil shortage, or to machinations by the ...”

“... Bryan Carsberg of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin ...”