“... until lately an unperceived element – of a certain native moderation of temper that is likely to mark his presidency. Yet his silence on Gaza has been startling, even immoderate. The ascent of Barack Obama was connected in the world as well as in the US with peculiar and passionate hopes, and his chances of emerging as a leader of the world are diminished ...”

“... Fifth String Quartet, Byzantium – a setting of W.B. Yeats for soprano and orchestra – and The Rose Lake (a fifth symphony for orchestra in all but name) flew off the page with improvisational abandon.Oliver Soden​ was born in 1990, and his Life of Tippett is refreshingly free of old prejudices and stale arguments. (The previous standard text, Ian ...”

“... dot; the position of the dot is the best estimate of the mortality rate; the bars through the dot mark the 95 per cent confidence interval: if the data are accurate and the method unbiased, 95 per cent of the time the true rate will be somewhere in this range. Hospital units are arranged in order of the number of operations performed, with smaller units to ...”

“... parties when it came to forming a government. They had been keen to join the Government, so as to mark a new chapter in their relations with the Jews. They have a combined strength of ten seats, and would have given unequivocal support to a programme of equality at home and peace abroad. Barak, however, spurned their advances because he wanted to have a ...”

“... yourself in the material, and the book will write itself.’ Which I did, and it did. Jacqueline Rose writes: It seems, rereading him now, that he was always, directly or indirectly, writing about survival. That the form of attention he conferred on literary objects was designed above all to allow them, and himself, to survive. What is it about a literary ...”

“... The last time was in Paris when we were having supper at Brasserie Bofinger. Bacon and his party rose to leave, whereupon all the waiters gathered in the window to watch the great man depart – something I could never imagine happening in London.14 February. Watch the beginning of A Matter of Life and Death on BBC2, where David Niven, having survived his ...”

“... Holocaust: the Stolpersteine, or ‘stumbling stones’, set in the ground in their thousands to mark the names of the murdered in the places where they once lived; the Holocaust Memorial near the Brandenburg Gate and its subterranean museum; the thousands of other reminders all over the country of the evils done in the name of Germany ...”

“... with identity, that keyword of the Eighties, evident in the GDR as well as the Federal Republic. A rose-tinted Prussia appealed also to those who disliked insubordinate youth, the role of interest groups in politics or the sheer messiness of party democracy. Life looked more attractive in theme-park Prussia, where the themes were duty, obedience and ...”

“... his salary details between fits of giggles. Bannister let him do what he wanted, and the ratings rose. Meanwhile Evans’s PR man, Matthew Freud, fed morsels of breakfast show ‘news’ to the voracious showbiz pages. Garfield obtains some clear-eyed comments from Freud about ‘leveraging’ Evans’s ‘media equity’. Such transactions, though, like the ...”

“... he was transferred to Number Ten as Assistant Private Secretary to Neville Chamberlain. It was a mark of high favour that at the tender age of 23 he should be entrusted with prime ministerial secrets of which high-ranking members of the Government were in ignorance. Loyalty was Colville’s forte. During the phoney war he belonged to the up-and-coming circle ...”

“... Though nothing like as coherently written and argued as the article, it, too, left a permanent mark on its field with its discussion of the issue of privilege. It became required reading for all undergraduates needing an introduction to the Ancien Régime, and went on to achieve the rare distinction of being translated into French with the high endorsement ...”

“... Britain; ‘Scotland’ seemed remote, even irrelevant. Nationalism was a creature of the Rose Street twilight – ‘the chip on the shoulder, growing and growing’ (Rayner Heppenstall’s words?) – scowling against the modern world. ‘Homogeneity’ was a function of imperial and wartime pressures, and a marginalisation of the ...”

“... they blow smoke rings of marijuana and praise the economic theories of Milton Friedman. ‘America rose and fell on the melodies of New Canaan’s songs about the economy. Songs sung by a Jewish economist and mimicked by Wasps who would have thought twice before playing golf with the guy.’ The wives meanwhile are listless and bored. Strung out on quack ...”

“... always been observed to be the case before a great revolution, or when a man destined to put his mark on his generation, as the newspapers say, is about to appear. To be sure, it was not a man this time, but Miss Marjoribanks; but the atmosphere thrilled and trembled to the advent of the new luminary all the same.The thrilling and trembling is quite in ...”

“... his hand. ‘Is it OK to have this?’ Over the logo of his laptop he had pasted a sticker of the rose window in Notre-Dame. The woman looked at him. ‘We’re not that crazy.’The journey to the lycée from my apartment in central Paris took about an hour: the last mile, by bus from the railway station, seemed to take as long as the first ten. I never knew ...”