“... iced over, well-nigh irrecoverably. Earth was prevented from becoming a permanently lifeless ball of ice only through processes which are not fully understood. This is known, with appropriate chillingness, as the ‘snowball earth event’. Most of the variation in the earth’s climatic cycles comes from small irregularities in its orbit. These ...”

“... Tom Hopkinson, the palaver over Silas Glossop, the father of her children, her affairs with George Barker, David Gascoyne, Eric Siepmann, Ronald Moody, Basil Nicholson, Ian Henderson ... And she could never write about the incident following her release from the asylum, when she was visited in her bedroom by a man with a mutilated leg, wearing her ...”

“... Did it have any wider meaning? Was it an aberration? On 17 April 1855, Queen Victoria held a ball at Windsor Castle to celebrate the state visit of Napoleon III. Its location was the magnificent Waterloo Chamber, a symbol of Britain’s global ascendancy. If Napoleon III, nephew of the original, minded dancing with ...”

“... been incorporated into the triumphalist narrative. The reductio ad absurdum of this process was George W. Bush’s speech in the summer of 2003, on Gorée Island off the coast of Senegal – a notorious depot in the slave trade. By resisting injustice, Bush announced, ‘the very people traded into slavery helped to set America free.’ Even the traffic in ...”

“... putting the reader inside the heads of both characters as well as his own, as if the ball is being tossed from Anna to Vronsky to the narrator at high speed without ever being dropped, is one of the supreme moments of craft in all fiction, and evidence that Tolstoy was quite capable of imagining what his wife was feeling at any moment, had he ...”

“... way Balzac’s 30-year-old coquette would sit, on a chair stuffed with down, after an exhausting ball … His skin had a sort of feminine delicacy to it; he had blond hair, wavy in nature, which outlined his pale, noble brow so picturesquely … However blond his hair was, his whiskers and eyebrows were black – the mark of breeding in a person … To ...”

“... was the restoration of the exuberant money culture last seen in 1929. Ronald Reagan’s inaugural ball, held in January 1981, opened a new age of unabashed consumption – with no worries about old money quibbling over good taste. After a crushing recession, the markets took off in the mid-1980s and Wall Street finally returned centre stage, now sporting a ...”

“... Like many post-Warhol artists half in love with easeful ambiguity, they were mostly just having a ball talking up their product, using a gauzy syntax equal parts art-speak and modish advertising. But there is also a slightly embalmed feeling, familiar from such artists as Warhol, Helmut Newton, Gilbert & George: not a hair ...”

“... took hold. And when he woke, somewhere in South Carolina, Sam was saying how much he admired George W. Bush. ‘I voted for Bush last time,’ he said. ‘I liked the way he handled 9/11. He’s a strong president. Hell, he’s my commander-in-chief.’ Terry gave him a long, weary look, and rubbed his eyes. Neither Sam nor Terry has ever possessed a ...”

“... frontier depends on three things: cats, guns and e-mail. The sleeping beasts, curled into a fur-ball, operate as controllers, programming the writers to pitch a new kind of fiction: the familiar tricks and reflexes of genre fodder macerated in a literary sensibility. Poetry smuggled in at the back door. Sallis, an accomplished musician who has played and ...”

“... all this immensely but, of course, I couldn’t help knowing that it wasn’t all a dream, as in a George Landow film, from which the audience would awake with a jolt at the end of the last reel. I felt that it wasn’t enough to say it was all over now, that Atlantis had finally sunk beneath the sea, carrying with it a utopia which, as Hoberman ...”

“... the signatories of its petition for freedom of expression an impressive range of talents: Lucille Ball, Eddie Cantor, Kirk Douglas, Melvyn Douglas, Deanna Durbin, Melvyn Frank, Daniel Fuchs, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, Ava Gardner, Judy Garland, Henry Hathaway, Van Heflin, Fritz Lang, Burt Lancaster, Audie Murphy, Burgess Meredith, Groucho Marx, Vincente ...”

“... economic matters could read his spirited attempts to convert Senator Bronson Cutting, Congressman George Tinkham and Senator William E. Borah to Poundian solutions to American policy issues: these were collected in volumes published in 1995, 1996 and 2001 respectively. His epistolary career began with this of 1895 to his mother, Isabel, who was visiting ...”

“... the lessons of corporate efficiency to the problem of winning ballgames. What if, instead of a ball club, with all its codes, traditions and biases, we took something like ‘British culture’, with all its codes, traditions, biases etc? What strikes me most looking back on my little confrontation with Mrs Hazel is not what a tick I must have been (though ...”

“... in before that Charlie Richardson, leader of the Richardson Gang, was buried here, as well as George Cornell, the gangster shot by the Kray Twins in The Blind Beggar pub. But it was the graves and sentry toys of the unknown children that had lodged in my mind. The trees were bare, filtering light on the tombstones and pointing down at the stories gathered ...”