“... it came to amending the law the judges had challenged. Instead, the Commons discussed it – once Charles Clarke and his opposite number, David Davis, had stopped talking – for a grand total of 80 minutes. Oh well. To return to the question of how things got to be like this, we have to accept the plain fact that ideologically speaking, there is no ...”

“... In 1629, King Charles I granted the Massachusetts Bay Company a standard commercial charter containing a clerical slip that changed the world. The document charged the stockholders with duly electing a board of management – a governor and 18 assistants – and holding them to account at quarterly meetings. However, crown officials failed to specify where the company headquarters should be (London would have been the usual assumption) and the wily leaders of the company absconded to New England, where they transformed quarterly meetings into government sessions, stockholders into freemen, assistants into magistrates, the governor into a Governor, and then piously declared their new regime to be ‘a city on a hill’ ready to serve as a model of divinely inspired governance for the rest of the world (well, for England, which came to the same thing ...”

“... to end,’ the gung-ho Colonel Kilgore played by Robert Duvall says in the film. Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) later repeats the line, thinking how happy the young men travelling upriver with him will be when that day comes, and they can go home. ‘The trouble is,’ Willard adds, ‘I had been back there, and I knew it just didn’t exist any more.’ The ...”

“... She was both admired and loved by her peers and counted among her closest friends at the magazine Charles Addams, Brendan Gill, William Maxwell (who edited her stories for twenty years, and who has written the Introduction to a reissued collection, The Springs of Affection) and Joseph Mitchell – as well as Shawn himself. They loved to listen to her because ...”

“... had made ‘a film for everybody’. The Godfather was an ideal merging of ‘commerce and art’. Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets was ‘a triumph of personal filmmaking’ and a gripping thriller. For Sontag, these films were merely a case of Hollywood ‘plagiarising’ European innovations and rendering them ‘banal’. For Kael, they rejuvenated what ...”

“... of the Free City of Danzig in 1927, then under the protection of the League of Nations, and like Charles Dickens, Jan Neruda, James Joyce, Theodor Fontane and his acknowledged exemplar Alfred Döblin, he places his native city at the centre of his creative imagination. Grass’s best work so far is given over, again and again, to its evocation: a very ...”

“... of concerts for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, then run by another cultivated Brit, Sir Charles Moses. Goossens found an ‘immense spirit and enthusiasm’ for the musical arts, but nowhere to satisfy them beyond Sydney Town Hall, a wedding-cake confection in Second Empire style with fuzzy acoustics, seating at best 2500. Like many ...”

“... theatre-minded students have done, when appealed to to go away and read Marriage à la Mode or Sir Martin Mar-all or Don Sebastian or Amphitryon. They have nodded, said ‘interesting’, and gone away to direct Congreve or Otway or Vanbrugh or Etherege or Wycherley or Southerne or Behn, sometimes with dazzling success. Dryden’s plays lack the dramatic pace ...”

“... did we.There were nine Ferraris on the track, along with two Lamborghinis, a Porsche, an Aston Martin, a Maserati, a McLaren, an Alfa Romeo, a pair of Audis and a Nissan (if you think that sounds like the odd one out, think again: the Nissan GT-R has a top speed of nearly 200 mph and can go from 0 to 60 in 2.7 seconds). The F430 (top speed 197 mph, and 0 ...”

“... New Orleans’s Saint Charles Avenue is lined with oak trees whose broad branches drip Spanish moss and Mardi Gras beads from the pre-Lenten parades, and behind the oaks are beautiful old houses with turrets, porches, balconies, bay windows, gables, dormers and lush gardens. There are no refineries for miles, hardly even gas stations on the stretch I was on in mid-June, and the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded on 20 April and the oil welling up a mile below it were dozens of miles away as the bird flies ...”

“... be honest’ another of his frank-seeming phrases.11 June. Why isn’t more fuss made over Charles Causley? Looking through his Collected Poems to copy out his ‘Ten Types of Hospital Visitor’ I dip into some of his other poems, so many of them vivid and memorable. Well into his eighties, he must be one of the most distinguished poets writing today ...”

“... for broad groups of “minorities” ’ – the affirmative action which, he wrongly asserts, Martin Luther King Jr opposed. According to Evans, moreover, the ‘ill-judged 1965 Immigration Reform Act’ – it repealed the restrictive, ethnocentric national origins quotas of the 1924 legislation – transformed the ‘ethnic mix of the country’, as ...”

“... tenure introduced outright ownership in 2004) and in Cornwall (where the duke of Cornwall, Prince Charles, is the ultimate owner). But the state, in the form of national and local government and their agencies, acquired very little land until the 1890s, when county councils began to establish farms that would give young people an agricultural training at a ...”

“... premier reward for martyrdom. The relationship between sainthood and stupidity – think of Charles Bovary, a fool raised by what he endures, or Princess Diana, the patron saint of non-swots – is a connection that lies too deep for tears in these biographies. Yes, they are simple-hearted bids for approval, but there is also something vicious in the ...”

“... she turned to the work of the poet Nelly Sachs, who chose to rinse her German in the waters of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig and their version of scripture, rather than depend on Luther’s translation; Sachs wanted to catch their ‘psalmodic breath … creating a new space for responsibility instead of being crushed under the weight of original ...”