“... made it so attractive to government that it became virtually unrepealable despite this explicit death wish. The problem posed by the cessation of hostilities with Germany and Japan in 1945 was met by a timely emphasis on the newly arrived Cold War ‘emergency’, and there matters stood in the decades that followed, with one bout of paranoia after another ...”

“... you do well to forget your own advice. 2. Last April I began to write an account of the life and death of Rosemary Nelson, a 40-year-old solicitor in the town of Lurgan in County Armagh. At 12.40 p.m. on 15 March she got into her car outside her house at 5 Ashgrove Grange. As she drove away a bomb went off in the car. She lost both legs and suffered fatal ...”

“... Screeched and pranced around the Rotunda like an inebriated baby goat? Beaten a policeman to death? I could be wrong, but I don’t think so. Imagining something and doing it are two different things – or so I, like Caliban, would like to believe. Thought is free.Of course, Highsmith was unsurpassed at depicting such destructive self-abandon, above ...”

“... the story with the recent work of Colin Matthew, Roy Jenkins, Richard Shannon, John Vincent, Sarah Bradford and Stanley Weintraub. Essentially it’s dry-bones parliamentary history – elections, cabinets, reshuffles, bills, budgets, divisions, dissolutions – and its verdict on the falling out hardly deepens our understanding: ‘By the end of ...”

“... early fire went out of the literary affair, into affectionate long-distance phone calls. Then, the death of one party, and a shared afterlife of warring biographies, resurrected backlists, found fragments (better left to obscurity), impertinent television documentaries, and the smothering embrace of reluctant academic acknowledgment. The conjunction of ...”

“... own words that her models were the divas of opera and theatre, or the great dancers of ballet: Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse et al (silent movies are much closer to ballet and grand theatre than they are to Breaking Bad). Both Bernhardt and Duse offered the young Negri the same melancholy advice: one could choose perfection of the life or perfection of ...”

“... I sat at the bar with Douglas Gordon while he drew me pictures of devils (I have them somewhere). Sarah Lucas and I walked the streets in search of more drink after Damien Hirst told Will Self to ‘crack a fucking smile’. I think I sang with Milli Vanilli. Life coaches will tell you that nothing interesting happens after three o’clock in the ...”

“... summer of 1776, Burke and Fox began to meet and talk with increasing regularity. Fox’s cousin Sarah Lennox remarked with some surprise that the princeling of Holland House had ‘left off all his fine acquaintances … and lived quite with Mr Burke’. By the time of Fox’s visit to Chatsworth in 1777, the friendship had been sealed and Burke’s ...”

“... values and sexual difference are necessarily in harmony. A dissenting view (argued in Sarah Schulman’s The Ties that Bind) is that the family, irrespective of class, is where sexual minorities learn about their worth, or lack of it. Some families manage a welcome (the writer Tom Wakefield, son of a Staffordshire coal miner, often talked about ...”

“... enacted what we have long been accustomed to think of as a romantic programme, whereby love and death converge, and dying young is the thing to do, whereby other people, and common life, are a thing to be escaped from, and a tension develops between the duty to a partner and a cultivation of the self, between the dictates of an amour fou and an amour de ...”

“... marriage certificates with an X. In my own time, because of what’s happened, because of the death of the big industries, we’ve been given to singing a kind of hymn to Glasgow’s industrial might. And you’d need a heart like a swinging brick to sneer at the magnificence of those ships and those engines, or to deny the human effort they embodied. But ...”

“... diverse in talent and sensibility as Rebecca Brown, Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Gary Indiana and Sarah Schulman, writers whose main similarity seemed to be that they all started out at small presses before being ‘discovered’ by big houses.By now – by which I mean, in the most Nixonian sense of the phrase, at this point in time – the formation and ...”

“... Rossa were aware of Alfred Nobel’s dynamite compound, invented in 1867. ‘Dynamite,’ as Sarah Cole wrote in her book At the Violet Hour (2012),held highly idealised associations. It offered new vistas of power, not solely for its potential to wreak destruction but also for its ability to terrify a wide public. The connotations of dynamite for ...”

“... off to Constantinople on a steamer – the kind of modern vessel he opposed till the day of his death several decades later.The painter, David Wilkie, had been prescribed foreign travel by his doctor, as a remedy for what sounds like depression. He was a Scotsman who’d risen from poverty and, in the early part of the century, became a great favourite of ...”

“... Apartheid’s Chief Killer (2003), a book of interviews with Eugene de Kock, the apartheid death squad leader who was called ‘Prime Evil’ by his own men. The day after she first shook his hand, she woke up to find that she could not lift her right forearm, which had gone completely numb, ‘as if my body were rejecting a foreign organ ...”