“... 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 ...”

“... unsustainable co-ordination between businesses and governments. In 1931, as global depression took hold and prices fell, the governor of Oklahoma shut down oil wells by military force, declaring that ‘the price of oil must go to $1 a barrel; now don’t ask me any more damned questions.’ Price stability grows from the barrel of a gun, not the ...”

“... five hours’. The Lodge, on 3rd Avenue between East 53rd and 54th Streets, opened in 1952. It took its cue from Shaw’s, also on 3rd, which according to one former patron, was ‘a narrow little bar that gave you the feeling you were inside a bus … You would come in the front door and the bar was full of filthy, dirty, scuzzy paraphernalia hanging from ...”

“... to read the reviews aloud. ‘It is to be hoped that she will be recognised for what she is,’ John Ashbery wrote in the New York Times, ‘one of the finest modern writers of fiction, in any language.’ He went on to describe her prose as ‘a constant miracle’ in which ‘it is impossible to deduce the end of a sentence from its beginning, or a ...”

“... the Sun. Like the Journal, it is a paper that makes up stories, manufactures interviews that never took place and perverts real incidents. Day by day during the Falklands war there unfolded in its pages the most brutal, crude and unedifying journalism to have been seen in this country in – well, let us say in the lifetime of its unlikeable editor, the ...”

“... on every door in the parish to record the names of those who lived there and their occupations. It took the jurors three full days in December 1684 to cover Chilvers Coton, logging the location of all the dwellings, which were later marked on a map. The jurors described and itemised the landscape: angled red roofs, gables and windows, the location of chimneys ...”

“... human rights record, and for the second year in a petrostate’ (the previous two conferences took place in Sharm El-Sheikh and Dubai). The UK has outsized influence in Azerbaijan, thanks mainly to BP, the country’s biggest foreign investor. In September 2023, senior BP executives travelled to Baku for the centenary of the birth of Heydar Aliyev, a ...”

“... an escapee British general, Michael Gambier-Parry, who was renowned as a forger. O’Flaherty took him to Irish parties and introduced him to senior German officers as an Irish doctor. Gambier-Parry found safe lodgings with a group of nuns, the Blue Sisters.Another figure who aided those who had to hide or escape was Prince Filippo Doria Pamphilj, who ...”

“... in the political arena. For centuries the people who owned the land in Britain ran Parliament. It took a hundred years of struggle to give the people the power to choose and remove their political managers – MPs and ministers. If we can trust the country to democracy, why on earth can’t we trust individual firms to the people who work in them? … A firm ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”