“... Party hadn’t cared about looks when it picked the flaccid Wilson, the much-creased figure of Jim Callaghan or the stooping, stick-waving Foot. A bit of deconstruction suggested this was all a blind, that Labour had just had a Welsh boyo and an Edinburgh lawyer as leaders, neither of whom had made it. That was quite enough Scots, Picts and people from the ...”

“... Captain Kirk’s ears which they would have found captivating. Moreover, if it weren’t for our prior enthralment with feline physiognomy the stories that Thomas recounts would be much less absorbing. The interest inspired by the big cats is not exhausted in resolving the explanatory puzzles they raise, or even in the correction of our misconceptions ...”

“... shared (for varying periods of time) by Andre Agassi, Boris Becker, Monica Seles, Mary Pierce, Jim Courier, Anna Kournikova and Mark Philippousis, among others. Exactly how, though, on the evidence of this as-told-to memoir, remains a mystery. Who needs the world’s best tennis coach to be reminded to ‘keep your opponent guessing’ or to ‘focus at ...”

“... look like a 1940s cinema manager. 22 April. I do the rounds of the TV and radio arts programmes prior to the opening of the play on Sunday, accompanied by Jim Bik, our young low-key PR man. At one venue we are met in the lobby of some huge new communications emporium by the TV call boy who takes us through various ...”

“... that intimidatory fast bowling is ruining the game as a spectacle. I cannot but agree. In 1984, prior to the West Indies tour, he suggested that ‘the viciousness of ... today’s fast bowling is changing the very nature of the game.’ Following the ‘blackwash’ of England and the serious injuries to two young batsmen, he is moved to reiterate the ...”

“... do we have to allocate to get it free and fair?’ I was called to the phone. It was my friend, Jim, who’s been election-watching down on the Natal south coast. He’d just come back from seeing the bodies of a family of nine killed at Folweni. ‘They were butchered, I mean almost literally,’ he said. ‘Of course, neither the local Inkatha guys nor ...”

“... Jenkins bring off a spectacular result there; tried to take the nomination at Croydon despite the prior agreement that it was the Liberals’ turn; had to back out of that; and found herself forced to take up the next seat, Crosby, which she was bound to lose in the next election – the term used to describe her behaviour is ‘graceful’.The treatment of ...”

“... sophisticated organisation. All the work on agrarian secret societies (notably by Jim Donnelly) bears out Tom Bartlett’s claim that the violence they produced in this period was quite limited by European standards, amounting to only 50 deaths in the 30 years prior to 1793. In sharp contrast, 230 lives were ...”

“... It looks as if we’ve stumbled on the forward assembly area for one of the British brigades prior to invasion. On the way back we pass a line of coaches disgorging hundreds of British and US Marines. We stop and get out to talk to them. I don’t open my notebook but Paul takes pictures. They are wary and reserved, the Marines, standing tough and ...”

“... embedded interpretive history – a history that depends on the way one understands its domain, on prior decisions of inclusion and exclusion from a record of descent, on the way kinship is construed and imagined – with the narrower sense of genealogy as a set of practices: research undertaken by an ever broader group of people using an ever wider and more ...”

“... frustration are quite palpable. Even so, one boggles at a process of selection which made Wilson, prior to Thatcher, the longest-serving modern prime minister. Like many grammar-school meritocrats, the young Harold early developed an exaggerated need to please authority. As school captain he lavished praise on the house system, became a patrol leader at ...”

“... Charles Eliot Norton visiting professor at Harvard in 1955, before retiring with Willa to Swaffham Prior in Cambridgeshire. His reputation among younger poets was starting to decline. Thom Gunn, whose collection The Sense of Movement Muir had reviewed favourably, wrote in November 1958 to a friend: ‘I increasingly feel that perhaps my good time is over, and ...”

“... Moonie influence. William Simon, who had been one of Reagan’s chief fund-raisers in 1980, Jim Watts, Reagan’s Interior Secretary, and the Presidential counsellor, Claire Booth Luce, all agreed to accept honorific positions with the Times, which rapidly became the preferred house magazine of the Reagan Administration. The President himself has ...”

“... extended the note, Richards added to it some lines, now but not then famous, from Conrad’s Lord Jim. ‘The way is to the destructive element submit yourself ... So if you ask me how to be? In the destructive element immerse ... that was the way.’ This is an instance of his uncanny aptness in quotation: the way to read The Waste Land, and the way to live ...”

“... psychology, means accepting the theory that grew out of an experience as though it were logically prior. Henri Ellenberger, a psychiatrist by training and an inspired historian of the ‘unconscious’, was sufficiently impressed by Jung’s disclosures to allow Jung to review the chapter on himself in The Discovery of the Unconscious. Which caused the ...”