“... of meeting your family and colleagues afterwards, you’d do well to strip off and bathe. (You may wonder whether you need to strip, but the charming detail from Giacomo Jaquerio’s painting that adorns the jacket of Jay Olshansky and Bruce Carnes’s book suggests that this is the convention.) Immortality is not synonymous with eternal ...”

“... of the family’s property. ‘Let the practitioner never forget,’ he declared, ‘that he may be the patient’s last and only hope.’ Indeed, Conolly was extraordinarily mistrustful of families, warning of the tricks they might play to unsettle the alleged lunatic and present him in an excited state, giving as an example a wife who abused her ...”

“... new levels of celebrity on the right aren’t lost – they are found.’ Wolf, as Klein says, may well still think Bannon is ‘the devil’, in which case she may be some sort of Faust. ‘She is getting everything she once had and lost – attention, respect, money, power. Just through a warped mirror.’‘Thank you ...”

“... And families whom its air-cooled rear engine Will power to school. I’m saying this That you may take a pride in your work.’ Nervous execs whooshed him away For a photo session.                                        I lost my job In the first redundancies. ‘Does the daffodil have an income allocation ...”

“... of my life. None is good enough to keep Legacy ‘Do words just pop into your head?’ Some may go unexploded. * ‘Have you thought much about your legacy?’ I’m a legacy prisoner. No I’m not. * ‘What do you call precious?’ The precious doesn’t get around much so it stays small. Or it orbits the same small pronoun, a kid on a ...”

“... he had another enthusiasm too, less commented on, and cheaper to pursue: the pulp novels of Karl May, set in the Wild West and featuring cowboys, mostly of German descent, like Old Shatterhand, whose name refers to the power of his punch, and Winnetou, a Native American who converts to Christianity. May became the centre ...”

“... which remains unanswered, explained the real reasons for Musharraf’s actions: At the outset you may be wondering why I have used the words ‘claiming to be the head of state’. That is quite deliberate. General Musharraf’s constitutional term ended on 15 November 2007. His claim to a further term thereafter is the subject of active controversy before ...”

“... suffered in later life from a disease that he called ‘rheumatic gout’, which Peters suspects may in fact have been Reiter’s syndrome, a kind of reactive arthritis often associated with sexually transmitted disease. In any case, he and Dickens became fast friends, more and more intimate as Dickens grew estranged from his wife. Travelling together to ...”

“... sphere of operations. Oxford was what mattered, and what mattered went on in Oxford; this focus may (or may not) have served him well during his apparently successful stint as vice-chancellor in the early 1950s. Apart from writing accessible books about the ancient world, his energies were not directed to reaching out ...”

“... Politics’ is a strange word, and the particular nature of its strangeness may explain why so many people feel confused by or alienated from political processes. It can refer high-mindedly to ‘the political ideas, beliefs or commitments of a particular individual’. But it can also be more or less value-neutral – or indeed suggest a complete lack of principle – when it is used to mean ‘activities or policies associated with government ...”

“... archives stored in the Faber basement or in the keeping of William Golding’s family. No one else may see them; he alone can quote from unpublished novels, journals, memoirs, correspondence and conversations. He has made excellent use of these privileges, and the result is a full, friendly, and on proper occasions candid, account of a remarkable man, who took ...”

“... unforeseen, for situations other than the one the law-changer was trying to deal with. So one may turn out not to have made the legal change one was hoping to make. This means that, thanks to the rule of law, it is very hard for a government to get the law out of the way ad hoc so as to clear a quick and easy path to its policy objectives. Doesn’t that ...”

“... in pattern does not mean they must stand or fall together. They are about different things; one may be right and the other wrong. Modern evolutionary biology contains two main sets of theoretical ideas. One is the hypothesis of a pattern of common ancestry, roughly tree-shaped, linking all life on Earth. The other concerns the way change occurs within ...”

“... Raymond Chandler writes in ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1950) that ‘the English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.’ He’s specifically referring to crime novelists – the likes of Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie – in an attempt to wrest the detective story away from the English suburbs and towards the grittier (and far more romantic) novels written by himself and Dashiell Hammett ...”

“... having with their children. But I don’t think Davis’s great importance comes from the way she may or may not be talking about Lydia Davis. Writers tend to be either narcissists or voyeurs (though of course one can be both), and Davis is much more interested in other people than she is in herself. Even when she is ...”