“... to go bust and to ask what the government planned to do about it. ‘It was going to be a bad day,’ Darling says with dry understatement. Brown adopts a different approach. His starting point is Friday, 8 May 2009. He picks it because it was an ordinary day in the life of a prime minister, and he wants us to know how ...”

“... of Shelley’s complete poetry, edited by Crook. The first three volumes, edited by Donald Reiman, Neil Fraistat, Crook and others, appeared in 2000, 2005 and 2012. As Crook explains, Reiman died in 2019 ‘after a long illness that had caused him to retire from his editorial role’. The publication sequence was disrupted; volumes four, five, six and eight ...”

“... established in 1869 introduced, Bennion says, ‘a uniform technique ... which to the present day has steadily improved in exactness and precision’. This is a dangerous claim. The early 19th-century draftsmen who set out to provide for every conceivable contingency at interminable length had an almost indefeasible claim to exactness and precision ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... his case to the courts, and ultimately to the Supreme Court, where Trump’s three appointees (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett) would be sure to tip the balance in his favour. That there was no case – at least no case that could get a serious hearing – didn’t matter. What mattered was to keep up the pressure until the other side ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”