“... prostitutes and taking endless shots of dusty people unable to get up off the pavement. I may be alone in disliking this series. At any rate, Cartier-Bresson’s various visits to Mexico were considered fruitful enough to merit a discrete volume (Mexican Notebooks, 1995). But compared to the work of Mexican photographers – Manuel and Lola Álvarez ...”

“... as one might expect. In 1853 he explained it to – of all people – his lover Louise Colet: It may be a perverted taste, but I love prostitution, and for itself, too, quite apart from its carnal aspects. My heart begins to pound every time I see one of those women in low-cut dresses walking under the lamplight in the rain, just as monks in their corded ...”

“... George VI​ was crowned on 12 May 1937, a hundred years, less six weeks, after his great-grandmother Victoria succeeded to the throne. At 18 the new queen had been full of confidence. Her first action was to move her bed out of her mother’s room and have Sir John Conroy, her mother’s intimate adviser, banished from court ...”

“... suffered their first serious reversal when they were halted by the Red Army before Moscow. In May 1942 the first thousand-bomber raid on Cologne inaugurated nearly two years of mass destruction of Germany’s towns and cities. Just under a year later came the catastrophe of Stalingrad, where the remnants of the German 6th Army were forced to surrender in ...”

“... electronic music in particular. ‘Only through the use of electrical means,’ he writes, ‘may important advances in the exploration of sound be made’: ‘American music will be enlivened and enriched by such exploration and use of new musical materials. These can best be brought about through the co-operation of scientists with a real appreciation ...”

“... have some answers) by writing. At first she reads books by men. Graham Greene, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘that man who wrote Heart of Darkness, whose name escapes me’.I hardly ever saw so much as a glimpse of myself in any of their books and I didn’t care to. I didn’t want to exist in books. I liked how the men talked to other men and ...”

“... of The Magic Flute (all of this under the auspices of the American director Peter Sellars). Robert Lowell meant to write a libretto and duly boned up with intensive attendance at the New York Met, but never delivered. John Ashbery has not, so far as I know, produced a libretto – only the poem, ‘Syringa’, specially composed for a setting by Elliott ...”

“... of the end, which came in Lisbon in 1974. If there was a new beginning, it happened then. Robert Dahl, whom Anderson does not mention, dates the start of what he regards as the most recent of the three great waves of enthusiasm for liberal democracy, the one we’re riding now, to Portugal in 1975. Prompted by these events and a wider ...”

“... means or another. Despite the many who hated him, he died in bed. For I refer, of course, to Sir Robert Walpole, prime minister from 1722 to 1742, architect of the Whig supremacy, hammer of the Tories. His long tenure of power reminds us that Britain’s much-vaunted two-party system has in the past often given way in practice to something approximating to a ...”

“... for the narrator’s habitual academic delivery, one baulks at this stilted sentence: ‘You may be ever so much of a gentleman and a privy councillor, but if you have a daughter you cannot be secure of immunity [my italics] from that petty bourgeois atmosphere...’ This is exceptional and no worse than Hingley’s maladroit update in ...”

“... to describe how institutions work, he can expose the limitations of the revealing anecdote. On 25 May 1811, while Catholic Relief was debated in the House of Commons, every Irish member present was (it seems) intoxicated. It’s not clear why we learn this, rather than anything of the debate, or of what led up to it, or of the franchise more generally. Even ...”

“... trading interest, who looked with sympathy on the Parliamentary cause after 1629 (though we may well doubt whether such a cause yet existed), we would expect him to look for evidence of this new alignment in the records of the one company where top City men sat side by side with some of the Parliamentary leaders: the East India Company. But these ...”

“... whereas in fiction they really do. The novel has come to feel guilty about this art (the guilt may even be the symptom of a terminal disease), and novelists have tried hard – and in the case of someone like Virginia Woolf all too obviously – to avoid creating the novel’s all too solid artificial worlds. Dostoevsky does not appear to try; his genius ...”

“... A senior official told Scahill that Obama was ‘surprised and upset and wanted an explanation’. Robert Gibbs, a senior advisor to Obama, suggested that the boy wouldn’t have been killed if he’d had a ‘more responsible father’. A wrongful death suit against US officials for the death of both al-Awlakis and a third US citizen is pending. Scahill ...”

“... and nasty as his fish – Scraps out of every dish Thrown forth, and raked into the common tub, May keep up the Play-club: There, sweepings do as well As the best-ordered meal.By the time Jonson wrote these lines, Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre – or, as almost everyone now agrees, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, co-written by Shakespeare and the ...”