“... hearing their stories first hand. Eventually he was ‘stomped’ for his trouble, but at the price of a few broken bones gained the trust of the Angels, introducing them to Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, who invited them to Kesey’s La Honda ranch for a party that has since, in accounts by Tom Wolfe, Allen Ginsberg and others, achieved mythic ...”

“... all you had to do was state your fantastical intentions – Leeks (Blue Solaise), Leeks (King Richard), Nasturtium (Moonlight), Nasturtium (Whirlybird), Nasturtium (Canary Creeper) – and nature would take care of the rest. Guy’s income came mostly from the restaurant trade and the Union Square farmers’ market in New York. His specialities were dried ...”

“... of overlapping agencies, each competing for Presidential attention, and believing, in the words of Richard Helms (DCI 1966-73), that it had ‘to have a publication that arrives in the White House every morning’. Because of presidents’ short attention spans and crowded time-tables, the ‘publications’ have increasingly resembled tabloid newspapers ...”

“... that frightfully dreary thing in the East End?’ At the end of Carousel at the National Theatre, Richard Eyre escorts her to the door: ‘I’m glad you enjoyed the show.’ ‘I didn’t, I can’t bear the piece.’She was just as rude and inconsiderate in private, late to arrive and even later to leave which meant that nobody else could leave ...”

“... Winding up his efforts in the 1954 mid-term elections Vice-President Richard Nixon handed an aide the notes of his last campaign speech and said: ‘You might like to keep it as a souvenir. It’s the last one, because after this I am through with politics.’ Suffering one of his periodic depressions, Nixon had considered the matter with his wife Pat, and decided that he should retire from politics once his term as Vice-President finished in 1956 ...”

“... In 1730 he set out on what was in effect a subsidised Grand Tour, as the companion of Charles Richard Talbot; Thomson was to be paid a handsome salary. Sambrook notes: ‘As a “companion” he enjoyed a higher status than a tutor; also, his allowance of £200 a year was more than a travelling tutor would ordinarily have received.’ Thomson had every ...”

“... and the panicked selling of securities caused prices to collapse. Between 20 and 30 July, the price of shares in major businesses fell dramatically: Canadian Pacific Railway and Rio Tinto Copper dropped 15 and 24 per cent respectively. With everyone looking to sell, and almost no one to buy, the market in securities evaporated. On Sunday, 26 July, the ...”

“... of Hertford, c.1784, a plain, stuccoed, three-storey affair, nine bays wide. Remodelled for Sir Richard Wallace (of the Wallace Collection), natural son of the 4th Marquess, 1872-73, probably by Thomas B. Ambler and again in 1906-7 by Fryers and Penman for K.M. Clark. What remains on the site is a 1920s red brick servants’ wing and to the W, the former ...”

“... No one is fooled by the formula, ‘I’m just looking.’ In Updike’s world there is always a price to be paid. Like the nameless speaker of Browning’s ‘Pictor Ignotus’, Updike knows that perfection can never be perfect, that there is a question which must be answered: ‘Tastes sweet the water with such specks of earth?’ In Of the Farm, for ...”

“... in the fateful force of speaking. So the point of prophecy is not to give you tip-offs about share-price fluctuations but to be able after the event to affirm that they were foreseen. Prophecy throws out a lasso of utterances in which the predicted event is merely the occasion or waystation that allows the speech act to be drawn back in on itself: I tell you ...”

“... francs by the Louvre in the sale of 1852 which followed the Marshal’s death – then the highest price that had ever been paid for a painting. The exhibition Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting, which opened last year in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and went on to the Metropolitan Museum, New York, gave us a sample of the masterpieces in ...”

“... admitted. Her participation was a huge prize for Thein Sein and his regime, an endorsement without price; and some of her most loyal supporters thought it was premature. ‘When Daw Aung San Suu Kyi goes into parliament … the world will think that there’s democracy in Burma,’ the veteran NLD member Win Tin, a political prisoner for 19 years, said in ...”

“... When​ Richard Wright sailed to France in 1946, he was 38 years old and already a legend. He was America’s most famous black writer, the author of two books hailed as classics the moment they were published: the 1940 novel Native Son and the 1945 memoir Black Boy. By ‘choosing exile’, as he put it, he hoped both to free himself from American racism and to put an ocean between himself and the Communist Party of the United States, in which he’d first come to prominence as a writer of proletarian fiction only to find himself accused of subversive, Trotskyist tendencies ...”

“... also to have his children brought into the world with teeth, after the manner of Richard III’. Bowes seems not to have minded claiming the child (‘a small price to pay’, Moore decides, ‘for the spectacular fortune he now possessed’). The other children were sent away to various schools. He obliged ...”

“... Cohen considers the idea of ‘market socialism’: a system that would still be based on the price mechanism but would prevent the concentration of capital that produces the gross inequalities of the capitalist market. On balance, this would, for him, be better than nothing. It is ‘the genius of the market that it recruits low-grade motives to ...”