“... beginning, it’s hard to think of the child as safe. The knife is like Chekhov’s shotgun on the wall, which has to go off some time. We just don’t hear it going off. This is the 20th century, and Pinter has been here. The Cryptogram knows where it’s going, but seems uncertain about the road or the reasons. It’s hard to tell whether this is an effect ...”

“... the championship as he could be. Schumacher was in Senna’s mirror the second before he hit the wall on the Tamburello corner. It’s a notorious place – Gerhard Berger hit it in 1989, at a survivable angle – but anyone of experience would have known that. It’s impossible yet to be sure what it was that caused Senna suddenly to brake before he crashed ...”

“... and the Tuolumne meadows to the east, are mainly wild to this day. The 3000-foot steel-white wall and brow of El Capitan; the great scooped cranium of Tissa’ack (Half Dome); the planetary granite scalps of the Tuolumne domes; the pulsing, shimmering cataracts of Bridal Veil and Virgin’s Tears; the monumental columns of the sequoias and ...”

“... laughing often and rather loudly, and that wit was what he greatly loved in company of every kind. Richard Ladborough believes it to be ‘certain that he enjoyed female company’ Professor Brewer reports that in a lecture he ‘indulged in several of his more pointed anti-feminist witticisms’. (I myself can bear witness that, if seated beside a lady at a ...”

“... problem’.Nevertheless, we did have some information to go on. The first breach in the wall of ministerial secrecy was the publication in the Sunday Times in June 1973 of Barbara Castle’s address to senior civil servants, with the sort of first-hand description of bureaucratic erosion techniques that I had never seen published before:I remember ...”

“... world (exterior only). Thirty years ago, Hugh Dickinson proposed knocking down a Grade 1 listed wall to admit tourist coaches and so increase revenue (and the likelihood of floods). He didn’t get away with it. Sixty years ago, Kenneth Haworth removed George Gilbert Scott’s reredos and transparent iron screen from the chancel. He did get away with ...”

“... to keep escalating. Despite the ominous backdrop of the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon began a series of occasional bilateral discussions with Leonid Brezhnev aimed at managing the Cold War more calmly. Tensions in Asia were high, and China’s rivalry with the Soviet Union was intensifying, while the Berlin ...”

“... Petroski also suggests that financial gain shaped the design. He quotes from a post-mortem in the Wall Street Journal: ‘The course’s dangers became part of its marketing.’ Kumaritashvili was killed by the bottom line. A tight budget plus haste equals expediency: the wrong epoxy resin used to secure a concrete ceiling panel over a road in Boston’s Big ...”

“... takes his epigraph from Kipling’s novel) and Colonel Skinner, and masters of disguise like Richard Burton. Forrester is not the only one caught in the powerful storm. A beautiful, ‘ungovernable’ woman, Amrita, is in a palanquin on her way to get married. In the storm, which rapidly becomes a flood, she is separated from her retinue; she discovers ...”

“... to do? Go to the movies, style her hair, hang life-size posters of Kim Novak on her bedroom wall, plot her escape. Self-invention thrives in small spaces. Darling’s friend Jeremiah Newton recalled that ‘her pink bedroom held stacks and stacks of old magazines from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.’ It was so cluttered that when she later returned to ...”

“... from whom a degree of advocacy is appropriate. ‘In Solitude, for Company’, together with Richard Davenport-Hines’s new biography of the poet, provides further confirmation that Audens are a definite buy. The wavering flame of academic attention has been nursed through the dangerous, immediately posthumous years, and is now – with some help from ...”

“... into the Republican camp, though not all of them formally switched their party registrations. Richard Perle, a leading figure in the Republican defence establishment known as the ‘Prince of Darkness’, remains a registered Democrat. Among the neoconservative Democrats who moved over to join the Reagan administration was Paul Wolfowitz, Donald ...”

“... neo-Gothic in style, and built by George Gilbert Scott in 1856. It’s over Exeter’s garden wall in the north-west corner of Radcliffe Square, but you can’t quite see that. This was where I worked, though it was possible if one was so inclined to get to study in the much more exclusive and architecturally splendid surroundings of the Codrington, and a ...”

“... Bryan Carsberg of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin ...”

“... In the evenings, after dinner in hall, groups would take shape informally in the quad. There was Richard Cobb’s lot, making for the buttery and another round of worldly banter. There was this or that sodality, taking a cigarette break or killing time before revision. There was my own cohort, usually divided between the opposing tasks of selling the ...”