“... of four players. Lou Reed was the songwriter, singer, guitarist and attitudiniser extraordinaire. John Cale, an initiate of the minimalist and dissonant avant-garde under the tutelage of New York composer LaMonte Young, was the band’s violist and played bass guitar. Maureen ‘Mo’ Tucker, a self-taught teenage percussionist, played standing up, without ...”

“... where the expressive word, spoken or written, still seemed paramount – beneficiaries of what John Bayley once called “the inevitable solace that right language brings”. We were all, in varying degrees, sociable yet solitary.’It was a bold assertion. She was not only young, and relatively unproven, but the wrong gender; she was pushed right up ...”

“... like that. Did I want to get us all chucked in jail? I told her it was for my novel, but she took no notice of this lunatic excuse, and threw my first literary effort into the flames. Undaunted, I went to the public library, and took out a book on how to make a career as a writer. The first sentence went something ...”

“... in contemporary hen-house design, as if this were House and Garden rather than Farm-Poultry. John Evangelist Walsh has remarked that it was in these stories, published ten years before his first book of poems, that Frost had his first successes in capturing the flavour of real speech, voices which he later insisted poetry couldn’t do without. ‘Write ...”

“... banners and, in total ignorance of where they might be or on whose territory they had stumbled, took possession of the island in the names of the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. It was the beginning of the drama – and tragedy – of encounter, intrusion, conquest and settlement that culminated in the 1520s and 1530s in the Spanish overthrow of ...”

“... edition supplied them with their front-page stories. Columnists across the political spectrum took their tone from the Telegraph’s style of half-ribald, half-sanctimonious indignation. Some MPs even tried to out-Telegraph the Telegraph in their expressions of penitential shock at the excesses they were encouraged to indulge in by the House of Commons ...”

“... radar, the B-2 also operated undetected by the American people, who were oblivious to when bombers took off, where they went, or what they did. The new American way of war did not require the participation or even the active support of Americans, merely their acquiescence. This was by design: excluding the people increased the latitude exercised by officials ...”

“... the gap between the well-to-do and the rest of us widened, credit became easier to get and people took on a staggering amount of debt, putting themselves in the position of being one paycheck away from financial ruin. ‘When your bank says No, we say Yes,’ one mortgage company used to say. Even if one had a decent salary, once in debt to a bank, a credit ...”

“... a photograph of his parents, Nina and Semyon, seated across a restaurant table from whoever took the picture (presumably Shteyngart). Nina – the book is dedicated to his analyst, so let’s look first at his mother – has a coquettish tilt of the head, cropped hair and a tight-lipped, sly smile. She sits in front of an empty plate and a glass of ...”

“... has a lovely founding legend. In 1899 Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo’s Imperial University took leave from his post as professor of chemistry to study in Leipzig, where the best researchers could be found. He found other things in Germany too. They included cheese, tomatoes, asparagus and meat. For 1200 years meat had been banned in Japan – and, try ...”

“... out of it. From the 1860s to 1880s, a period of policy-driven famines on the subcontinent, he took on the monumental task of using the colonial state’s own statistics, published in its annual reports on Moral and Material Progress, to prove the ‘drain theory’ of British rule in India, challenging official claims of imperial benevolence and making a ...”

“... was a hallmark of the drifter, those who set out on an intentional journey by the new method took to carrying a suitcase instead. The term ‘automobile panhandling’ was used for a while before it was replaced in the 1920s by ‘hitchhiking’. The origins of the word are disputed. It may have built on ‘auto-hiker’, hobo slang for this new type of ...”

“... from further manuscript study, and, as his irrepressible desire to communicate with his readers took charge, his reflections on a variety of topics engendered by the momentous doings of his day. The edition of the Annotationes by Anne Reeve, of which the present volume on the gospels is the first of a projected three, is thus of great importance for our ...”

“... seas’. On 1 March 1990 two Unionists, Dr Christopher McGimpsey and his brother Michael, took a case to the Supreme Court in Dublin, claiming that the Anglo-Irish Agreement, signed on 15 November 1985 by Mrs Thatcher and the Taoiseach Garret Fitzgerald, is unconstitutional; that is, in breach of the 1937 Constitution. Thatcher and Fitzgerald solemnly ...”

“... has narrowed its meaning since Shakespeare wrote the Bastard’s great speech about it in King John, where it meant greed, self-interest, the opening bars of capitalism. Adshead’s book belongs to a recently growing genus of works on the history of particular commodities. To be of most value a study of this kind should be a part of general history, joined ...”