“... by my father from two abandoned rural slum dwellings and definitely not a part of Pamela’s William Barnes rustic dream – seems at first not to exist. All I know of it, as we drive down the narrow road, where ivied trees allow light in blinding flashes or not at all, is that it was put together as a new home for my father’s ...”

“... because the Americans could not be sure that the UN would pay the bills (the organisation has a cash-flow problem, not unconnected to overdue contributions from its major donor). Perhaps the ghosts of a million Rwandan dead provide a clue to the Secretary of State’s readiness to use force when genocide threatened in Kosovo. Armies blunder despite unity of ...”

“... all on the make, in a quiet way, in Jane.’ These are folk or fairy stories in which cash has a real presence. In the satire ‘The Beautiful Cassandra’, or in ‘Lady Susan’, it is easy for writer and reader to distinguish between love and money. Sense and Sensibility starts off the career we honour by making it clear that to choose between ...”

“... ceiling doesn’t help. Nor the perch of CCTV cameras keeping vigil on the permanent queue for the cash machine. Search the list for a lost relative and you are bang in the middle of the surveillance frame. Cameras are spiked like hedgehogs. Anybody withdrawing money, buying a railway ticket, is guilty. You are in the station’s memory loop, on tape: part of ...”

“... Parker, J.D. Salinger, E.B. White, Katharine White (the Mrs White of his telegram) and the sainted William Maxwell – nor did he pull up the ladder against younger novices coming aboard. So entwined was his identity with the New Yorker and its denominational place in American fiction that for a time there was talk of the three Johns: O’Hara, Cheever and ...”

“... business as a Maltese cat’.Mabel now concentrated on their publicity strategy. She contacted William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who agreed to write a piece on Dickinson. Of all the reviewers of the 1890 volume, Howells was the most intuitive:Occasionally, the outside of the poem, so to speak, is left so rough, so rude, that the art ...”

“... we understand the same rule to apply here? If Tony Blair had been charged with selling honours for cash, could he (or John Reid, or Jacqui Smith, or whoever was home secretary at the time) have procured the grant of a pardon in the name of the queen? I can’t think any British lawyer would give an affirmative answer to the question. One ground for rejecting ...”

“... tragedy, a squandered opportunity, a failure. ‘What was it he had missed?’ Kazin asks of William Dean Howells, whose modest novels fought the battle for realism as best they could. ‘Howells had missed something, and he knew it as well as the generations after him were to know it . . . He had spoken in all the accents of greatness without ever ...”

“... most of the most outlandish things still lay ahead of him, and he was stuck in the Canary Islands, William Carlos Williams wrote: ‘Bunting is living the life, I don’t know how sufficiently to praise him for it. But it can’t be very comfortable to exist that way. I feel uneasy not to be sending him his year’s rent and to be backing at the same time a ...”

“... the first ‘gas bridge’ were complicated. The Soviet president, Leonid Brezhnev, wanted the cash from energy exports to Europe to help fund the arms race with the US and support the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. But other members of the nomenklatura felt the money should be used differently. Kosygin thought it should be channelled into civilian ...”

“... and he soon became a must-see metropolitan attraction. Joshua Reynolds painted his portrait and William Parry did an ensemble piece of Mai, Solander and Banks. Mai met the king, Dr Johnson and Fanny Burney; a play about him was performed at the Theatre Royal; he learned to play chess and backgammon, and many agreed with Mrs Thrale’s comment about the ...”

“... a vat of nutrient juices had been a staple of speculative fiction at least since the 1920s. In ‘William and Mary’ from 1954 (twice rejected by the New Yorker), Dahl embeds that cliché of genre fiction in a dodgy relationship between a bullying academic husband and a resentful wife. The don agrees to have his brain taken out so it can live on after his ...”

“... saying to a Shadow Cabinet meeting on 31 July 1971, ‘the address on which my father’ – William Wedgwood Benn, a Liberal, then Labour MP, created Viscount Stansgate in 1941 – ‘fought the election in 1906: cheap food, reform and prosperity for the Port of London, freedom for the trade unions and justice for Ireland – and it doesn’t seem as if ...”

“... time fitting in without much money. He worked as a postman in Trenton, and managed to get enough cash together to join an eating club. Largely friendless and suspicious of the motives of the other members, he soon resigned. He spent a summer in Europe, discovered he had a knack for foreign languages, and resisted returning to Milwaukee, or enrolling in law ...”

“... postage stamp. Confusingly, the photographs span forty years and are left to speak for themselves. William Strudwick’s ‘Old London’ shots taken in the 1860s show much that had disappeared by Booth’s time: medieval coaching inns and the Lambeth riverside that was destroyed by the Albert Embankment, for instance. In the 1870s John Thomson’s portraits ...”