“... story is likely to take. Oblivious of her future degradation, Grace – who has ‘never worked a day in her life’ – follows Tom’s instructions: she collects tasteless figurines from the local shop; she tends the gooseberry bushes planted by Ma Ginger (played with immaculate unpleasantness by Lauren Bacall); she listens to the blind Jack McKay (Ben ...”

“... best captured in a line I knew from a sonnet by John Milton: “I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night.”’Biden became the tragic young man of the Senate, uncertain whether he should resign to look after his surviving children. But in his account the Senate’s old guard welcomed him and gave him unexpected responsibility in the form ...”

“... what a given user likes.’But a Spotify user will like different things depending on the time of day, their mood, whether they’re cooking or running or filing their taxes. As Tom, a product manager at Whisper, tells Seaver, ‘One listener is really many listeners.’ Someone might enjoy listening to techno, and jazz, and R&B. But that doesn’t mean they ...”

“... they’re proper mothers: she made a cake every Friday, picked her children up from school one day a week, tried to make friends with the stay-at-home mothers who networked in the playground (she always turned up, she says, in tracksuit and trainers, to show she was ‘focused’ on the children), and tried not to cancel outings. One half-term she’d ...”

“... bed, writing or having sex or sleeping: she could sleep, Kraus reports, for as many as 16 hours a day. Why did she sleep so much? Youngsters do of course, but also a lot of the time Acker was ill. Within weeks of her return to New York, she was diagnosed with pelvic inflammatory disease, a trouble usually caused by a sexually transmitted infection. This being ...”

“... 1990. On a number of occasions Bradbury even has his journalising hero give us the precise day of the month so as to synchronise the story with such public events as the fall of Mrs Thatcher on the 22nd. Doctor Criminale’s extended prelude is a description of the Booker ceremony in the autumn of this same year, at the Guildhall. The big night is ...”

“... wish it to be true. Harold Wilson was obsessed with the idea that the Daily Mirror could undo him; Neil Kinnock in his defeat accepted that it was ‘The Sun Wot Won It’; and more recent governments convinced themselves that the Daily Mail under Paul Dacre’s editorship was the voice of the electorate. In reality, Beaverbrook often got public opinion quite ...”

“... from Russia, seems to have had a demonic energy and a changeable temperament: he could spend all day hunting wild boar, yet another time might sit in his room, complaining of the cold and shivering. The year he spent at Maxim Maximych’s fort, near the Terek River, was eventful. A local Tatar prince has a daughter, Bela, whose beauty impresses Pechorin. At ...”

“... Trump era, has successfully promoted the appointment of many ultra-conservative judges, including Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, for whom they co-ordinated a $10 million campaign. Because of certain information not known to the public, it was widely assumed that Whelan and CRC were collaborating with Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans and possibly ...”

“... skull’. Reading Greats at Oxford had taught him more enjoyable, pagan reasons for seizing the day. But the reassuring idea that the cosmos was a Heraclitean flux was compromised by the philosophical idealism still current at Merton (the college where, a few years earlier, T.S. Eliot had written his thesis on F.H. Bradley). ‘Time’s face is not stone ...”

“... Corbyn project, the organisation has not had a good press. Momentum has been painted as a modern-day Militant Tendency, its members as ‘hard left’ entryists intent on deselecting MPs who offer any resistance. When I turned up early for a Momentum meeting in Hackney one evening (Owen Smith had emerged as the ‘unity’ candidate to challenge for the ...”

“... rank in their own profession – from whom they were not always so easily distinguishable in their day. Sutherland’s passion for justice and feeling for the underdog fuel his efforts: ‘below this corps d’élite there is a quantity of first-rate and consistently worthwhile achievement which has been let go into oblivion; wrongly so, I would ...”

“... answered in the enthusiastic endorsements of, for example, John Kenneth Galbraith, the reporter Neil Sheehan and the historian Sean Wilentz). The antagonist he explicitly argues with most often is his fellow philo-American of British origins, Paul Johnson (once on the Left, then Thatcherite, now an admirer of Tony Blair), whose own celebratory history of ...”

“... There are few historians who could now operate with such ease all the way from Keir Hardie to Neil Kinnock. Morgan combines historical knowledge with a lively interest in current politics; he shows no coy academic inhibition about linking up the two, for he knows how amply each can enrich the other. Take, for instance, his excellent chapter on ‘Joe ...”

“... garden in the shade. And while the old white rockers are well represented here (Bob Dylan 27, Neil Young 6, Bruce Springsteen 7), there is nothing from Rihanna, and only one line from Jay-Z (‘I’m not afraid of dying/I’m afraid of not trying’). Louis Armstrong and Aretha Franklin get one quotation each, which shows way too little R-E-S-P-E-C-T ...”