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“... He has that in common with his patient Mr Thompson, one of two Korsakov amnesiacs described in The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, who, says Sacks, ‘must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him’. Mr Thompson invents ...”

“... Austerlitz and in a state of huge, irrecoverable elation saw the evening star set ‘over the poor man’s cottage’. It’s a Wordsworthian spot of time, a historical moment in the prose Prelude which Hazlitt’s readers assemble from his collected works. Out of piety and curiosity I wanted to see where it happened and to walk the road to Shrewsbury, where ...”

“... about identifying two of the men involved, who are now dead (I am about to do so), but the man described in my book as the ‘young planter’ is still alive, and I will not name him. Within four hours of the explosions on 21 November five Irishmen – Paddy Hill, Gerry Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, Billy Power and Johnny Walker – were arrested at ...”

“... later we pulled up to A&E at Charing Cross. ‘I can’t sit down,’ Jason whispered, as a man abandoned his ambulance with its doors open and ran to bring him a wheelchair. There were no stretchers to be had, so we had to fold him down into it. His eyes, tracking back and forth, seemed to be seeing something else, terrible and horizontal: a red steppe ...”

“... his own reflection in a mirror – looking like a crayon portrait of the Don, ‘a lean, harrowed man, no longer young, not yet decrepit, his eyes a little agonised by some misty private vision, blind to the facts of life around’. He presents himself as a man travelling because he finds himself more acceptable among ...”

“... South Asian cricket, turns caustic when he writes about his own team. The English manager, Ray Illingworth, is typically graceless and petty, always finding an excuse for the team’s churlish behaviour on or off the field. He is slow to appreciate the brilliance of the Sri Lankans. Why, the despairing Winder asked, does England produce so many ...”

“... an absolute standard of poverty, and if so, what is it? Or is it all relative, since the poor man only feels deprived when at the gate of the rich man’s castle? What is the difference between the deserving and the undeserving poor, between those who labour but earn insufficient reward, and those who are impoverished ...”

“... companions on the Beagle,’ writes Ronald Clark, ‘soon ceased to wonder at the young man who caught 68 species of beetle in a single day and shot 80 species of birds in a morning’s walk.’ It was the daily drudgery – the describing, packing, numbering and shipping of skins, bottles and bones to Cambridge – that shows the real extent of his ...”

“... layoffs. The company never quite folded, and was sold to a venture capital firm in 2007. The man who hired me, one of the ‘founders’ – what is it about starting a website that makes people think they have a lot in common with George Washington? – is now a not very funny comic wine columnist. Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge is a period novel ...”

“... and Steve Baker, have military backgrounds. As with the Second World War, Brexit will perform an X-ray of our collective moral fibre. Remainers love facts, but are afraid of the truth. This is, I suspect, as close to a Conservative ideology of Brexit as exists. At the very least, it has some internal coherence, whatever it may lack in detail regarding the ...”

“... A Senate subcommittee put publishers on the stand: ‘Here is your May issue. This seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that’s in good taste?’ Fifteen comics companies went out of business in the summer of 1954 alone.Generations of fans have had their revenge. Wertham is ...”

“... it is a binding force. On the second day of the reunion, the former courtroom photographer Ray D’Addario showed some old newsreel footage, which was silent, of the trials in progress, and all over the darkened room you could hear a low chorus of murmurs and whispers as people identified themselves and their friends while the camera slowly panned over ...”

“... Margaret Blagge, burnished his pious image. But Sylva shows us quite a different Evelyn, a man who was driven by curiosity, ‘living for ingenuity’ and could even make a roomful of naval officials ‘die almost with laughing’. Luckily, Pepys was there, at the start of a long friendship, and, thanks to him, we know quite a lot more about ...”

“... imbued by the Holy Ghost as the parson who hunted six days of the week and preached another man’s sermon on the seventh. Some exhorters worked for the Cellar, Gutter and Garret Brigade, which combined the counselling of ‘fallen’ women, or women who looked like falling, with help in the home, two fields of activity from which male evangelists were ...”

“... had to print it out to keep it) on 29 October 1969, he inaugurated a new era; some months later Ray Tomlinson invented the first email program, using an @ address where such messages could linger.That first computer network was funded by Arpa, the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defence. The same outfit, now known as Darpa, with ...”