“... minister has come to office with so little experience of government or anything else. Fettes, St John’s College, Oxford, Lincoln’s Inn and a few years on the opposition benches in the House of Commons are a preparation of limited value for going into the ring in the world of lies and violence with the likes of Dick Cheney, Gerry Adams, Vladimir ...”

“... repurposed for a documentary). The new 3D version of the movie released in time for the centenary took its gross earnings above two billion dollars. In the movie, the 101-year-old Rose DeWitt Bukater, who was 17 when she survived the sinking, learns that a 1996 expedition had been looking for a necklace, the Heart of the Ocean, that went down with the ship ...”

“... the event, buying a ticket to a gig at the Monarch on 1 June 2001. So he sent me the money, eBay took its cut, I sent him the CD, we provided each other with positive feedback, eBay item number 250,026,512,619 dropped from public view, and I started looking around for other things to sell. The first item to be traded on eBay, according to popular legend, was ...”

“... of turning away from you.’ It is no wonder that soon after this Alice stopped writing to him and took off for a summer in Canada. In a gesture that goes unmentioned here, she nonetheless seems to have left him a parting gift: a small compass that William’s most recent biographer, Robert Richardson, takes as a hint that her lover orient himself in her ...”

“... of other views like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. Obama knew little economics, however, and he took the word of the orthodox. It would have been wiser, from a merely prudential standpoint, to consult Summers behind a screen. But Obama has always craved legitimacy in a conspicuous form. He is a president who does not like to be a bringer of bad news ...”

“... in part to buy time while composing the next line. (As it happens, Parry corresponded with John and Alan Lomax, who travelled around the American South recording folk musicians.) ‘The singer of tales,’ Parry later wrote, ‘has no pen and ink to let him slowly work out a novel way of recounting novel actions, but must make up his tale without ...”

“... the Road to the Sea’, and though Mew may here be glancing hopefully at herself as an adult who took a tiny size 2 in boots, she may also be looking back at the time when she liked herself best – when she was really minute. In her essay ‘An Old Servant’ she writes with relish of a cosy and firmly administered regime in which cold baths and daily ...”

“... in cellars; they rented a room by the week or the night in lodging or ‘doss’ houses. Others took their chances on the streets. Booth maintained that he was trying ‘to learn how the poor live’ rather than providing evidence for a doctrine or argument, but the descriptive notebooks on which the survey was based go far beyond fact-finding. He and his ...”

“... I have generally done well in examinations and not been intimidated by them. Back in 1948 when I took my O Levels – or School Certificate as they were then called – I was made fun of by the other boys in my class because on the morning of the first paper I turned up in a suit. It was my only suit and already too small but to wear it didn’t seem silly to me then as I thought the examination was an occasion and that I must rise to it accordingly ...”

“... all who promoted evil in this country.’ We were at Mar-a-Lago for the premiere of a film about John Eastman, one of the lawyers who tried to overturn the 2020 election results. Buses were bringing in guests from the Hilton West Palm Beach; ‘red-carpet opportunities’ with Rudy Giuliani had been advertised. The film came out on the anniversary of the ...”

“... hands of the murderous and unstable emperor; they would have remembered the public rioting that took place when Nero replaced her by marrying his mistress Poppaea (whose beauty, according to one of the play’s choral odes, rivalled that of Helen of Troy; Octavia, meanwhile, is portrayed as a model of virtue, but no one mentions her appearance). They would ...”

“... Rita Hayworth, Natalie Wood, Marlene Dietrich (drawn while posing, clearly), Simon Callow, John Gielgud and Ian McKellen. (My husband, David, incidentally, is related to Dietrich – on his mother’s side.) The screenwriters don’t include Dorothy Parker, although I’m fairly certain that Bachardy once did her portrait in black and ...”

“... you kidnapped me from my house, in my country, and sent me to Jordan for torture, and then took me from Jordan to Bagram, and I’m still worse than the people you captured with guns in their hands?’ ‘Yes, you are. You’re very smart! To me, you meet all the criteria of a top terrorist. When I check the terrorist check list, you pass with a very ...”

“... a cumbersome Edwardian three-seater decked out in Sanderson chintz, became my island of retreat. I took the sunniest room in the house for my study and since Raphael had no television, I rented one from Rediffusion on the Bethnal Green Road. It came on a stand and could be wheeled discreetly to one side. Draped with a dark red velvet curtain, it lent a ...”

“... first Trainspotting movie, and Irvine Welsh still cannae act to save his life. In the original, he took the part of Mikey Forrester, the Muirhouse-based purveyor of inferior opiate products, the one who sold the suppositories Mark Renton shat out in the bookies’ toilet. And he was delightful at it, smirking and giggling in his Wattie Buchan T-shirt, like the ...”