“... night had 18.7 million viewers; in 1998, the Titanic year, it was 57 million. This is getting to be like the last stages in musical chairs. Folklore says the Academy hires good-looking suits and gowns to fill the theatre seats when stars and quasars retreat to the bar or take meetings. Why can’t we have pretty virtuals to take our places in the living ...”

“... themselves, but a quirk of scheduling: ‘the Salon no longer exists; in a few days it will be replaced by an exhibition of automobiles which will stand there, long and dumb, each one with its own idée fixe of velocity.’ The public wanted its preconceptions back in a hurry. Kipling should have been there. He was ...”

“... Lentricchia has written a lengthy chapter on each member of his quartet. Yet Eliot is represented by ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and The Waste Land only, Stevens primarily by ‘Sunday Morning’ and ‘The World as Meditation’, Frost by a handful of short poems; while the ...”

“... have been allowed to join the Union. I didn’t mind the question, though. Mormons may no longer be subject to extermination in Missouri (that legislation was rescinded in 1976), but the eleven million Latter-Day Saints – a little under half live in the US – are generally thought to be peculiar, when they are thought ...”

“... in which the championship was a two-horse race – and a very close race, so that there may never be a consensus lasting more than fifty years as to which of them was the winner. Nevertheless, there is a clear distinction in their greatness, one relating purely to its nature, not its degree. It’s that Matisse did not possess or need to possess genius. The ...”

“... his body at 4.45 p.m. His family had been at the scene all day as firemen removed the bricks one by one. I asked the inspector who was accountable for an accident like this on a demolition site. ‘Historically,’ he said, ‘the Health and Safety Executive could only blame the contractor. But since the introduction of the Construction (Design and ...”

“... above the tree-line, they split into two groups, so that if one was snowed under, the other would be able to attempt a rescue. Snow thundered down and the youngest member, Anatoli Povykalo, just 18, was overwhelmed. The others dug him out, unharmed. They spent the night in the forest, where hundreds of trees had been snapped off a few metres above the ...”

“... the plan had been intended to affirm. Just when, around the end of April, the trouble seemed to be halfway resolved, with millions finally insured and several deadlines put off, there emerged stories of faked records of treatment and months-long waiting lists at Veterans Hospitals. It was another failure of managerial competence, in another branch of ...”

“... What he meant was that in a truly political struggle the way of life of an entire community has to be on the line. The job of the political leader is to decide on what Schmitt called ‘the friend/enemy distinction’: who we can live with, and who we can’t. He meant it literally: if we can’t live with them we might have to kill them. Schmitt was, for a ...”

“... compelled to list ‘Lolita complex’ in the index), and raised, with his wife, the child he had by the wife of one of his assistants. Then there were the children who never grew up: practical jokers like the brilliant Russian Lev Landau or the acid-tongued Wolfgang Pauli. They formed a tight-knit community. When not meeting at Bohr’s Institute for ...”

“... century. The confessional conflicts, rebellions, plagues and famines of the 16th century were mild by comparison. ‘’Tis tru we have had many such black days in England in former ages,’ James Howell wrote in 1647, ‘but those parallel’d to the present are to the shadow of a mountain compar’d to the eclipse of the moon.’ In his Essay on the Customs ...”

“... has chosen this moment to burgle the safe in the president’s office, and is caught redhanded by a secretary. As they struggle, she presses the button used to summon the janitor from his basement hutch. Gloomy already, Charlie doesn’t exactly jump to it. What follows is a brilliant pastiche of the race-to-the-rescue sequences D.W. Griffith pioneered in ...”

“... leader of the Labour Party, who wins power at a general election but has it prised away from him by a conspiracy of securocrats, tycoons and Labour turncoats. Its characters were recognisable as an amalgam of the passing generation of Labour heavyweights, from Benn himself to Barbara Castle and bruisers like Denis Healey and Eric Heffer. Its atmosphere ...”

“... of two million. Labour leaders like Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald were traitors who should be ‘shot at dawn’. Readers were urged to wage a ‘blood feud’ against Germans living in Britain: ‘You cannot naturalise an unnatural beast – a human abortion – a hellish freak. But you can exterminate it.’ Bottomley went around the country giving ...”

“... on the role of the radical Right in the history of Zionism. The state of Israel was created by left-wing elements, led by the social-democratic Labour Party. The Revisionists were the right wing of Zionism prior to 1948, but they were a small constellation in the Zionist firmament, a minority opposition in a largely ...”