“... vulnerable to attacks from religious quarters, as was shown in the armed occupation of Mecca’s Grand Mosque in 1979 by an eclectic group of extremists led by Juhaiman al Utaibi. A child of the Ikhwan who grew up in the shadow of its defeat, Juhaiman and his two hundred followers (who included Yemenis, Sudanese, Kuwaitis, Iraqis and Egyptians as well as ...”

“... one point in the early stages of the 1996 campaign, Branch asks him ‘whether he focused on the grand strategies or the daily polls and individual states. “All of those,” he replied. “I think about all of those.”’ His appetite for information is insatiable, whatever the subject. When he talks to Branch about technical problems at the Hubble ...”

“... In the Thirties and early Forties the English poet David Gascoyne was much enamoured of the Continental, Late Romantic image of writing and of the writer as a visionary misfit. By the end of the Thirties, his place in the great Euro-Visionary Song Contest was almost secured. He confessed his ambition in his Journals in 1938: Want to write an essay on ‘The Apotheosis of Lautréamont ...”

“... the vapid tax-and-spend policies they had drifted into. Their new spokesmen – Vincent Cable, David Laws and Mark Oaten – are the first prominent Liberals since Jo Grimond who could seriously claim to be heirs of the Grand Old Man. Political commentators point out that parties make such shifts because otherwise they ...”

“... will move in and out constantly. There will be no community at all.’ The opponents of the Grand Project, this unoccupied City of Illusions with its vivid blue frontier, its plywood scarf, are a community bonded in loss. Whisperers approach me from every side: informed, confused or manageably deranged. On the trading floors of London, on manicured golf ...”

“... genius and renown, the British and American mass audience was thrilling to the reborn version of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. The movie, which is the closest investigation most English people have made of their country’s long, intense, misunderstood encounter with Islam, is actually rather touching in its attempt to ‘understand’ the other by ...”

“... In​ 1975 David Bowie was in Los Angeles pretending to star in a film that wasn’t being made, adapted from a memoir he would never complete, to be called ‘The Return of the Thin White Duke’. This dubious pseudonymous character was first aired in an interview with Rolling Stone’s bumptious but canny young reporter Cameron Crowe; it soon became notorious ...”

“... now if one who comes of the same stock has not a right to give his opinion in such like cases. David Hume liked this story, and in 1741 retold it in his marvellous essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, where he wrestled with the question of whether such delicacy of judgment was really possible. Some people doubted any such thing, but he did not. Writing in ...”

“... of this last kind of interpreter is Christopher Ricks, whose previous books include Milton’s Grand Style, Keats and Embarrassment, T.S. Eliot and Prejudice and Beckett’s Dying Words. Dylan’s Visions of Sin is the culmination of at least three decades’ critical engagement with the songs of Bob Dylan (he first wrote about them in the Listener in June ...”

“... need to be identified and treated in an aggressive way.’ On 1 July 2009, a Plymouth County grand jury dropped all criminal charges against Dr Kifuji. Carolyn and Michael Riley were respectively convicted of second and first-degree murder earlier this year. How did we come to this? In Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder, ...”

“... to put people right about other people is incorrigible, indeed obsessional. In his review of David Cecil’s biography of Max Beerbohm Malcolm Muggeridge allowed it to be a graceful job of work, but said it missed the real point about Beerbohm and his lifestyle, which was that he concealed his Jewish origins and was a crypto-homosexual. Of ...”

“... feel – as did many writers in the 18th century – that, until the arrival of the fully-formed David, their achievements failed, with only rare exceptions, to match up to the expectations aroused by the prestige with which they were surrounded. The reasons for this failure in a society so extraordinarily rich in artistic talent should be a matter of ...”

“... David Kohn opens his monumental Darwinian Heritage with a deftly-delivered kick, observing that a study of the wider institutional culture of Darwin’s day seems to be ‘beyond the present ken of historians of 19th-century biology’. It’s a well-aimed blow. Little of the Darwin industry’s capital has been spent on exploring evolution in its social context ...”

“... a minister had laid himself open to possible blackmail. Stephen Ward, who was an osteopath with a grand clientele, and who had led a mildly louche life, was charged with living on immoral earnings and committed suicide the night before the jury handed down its verdict of guilty. Everyone felt uncomfortable about Ward, but no one believed, since he was ...”

“... media ubiquity without being turned on, in one way or another – whether they’re Tony Blair, David Beckham, Princess Diana or Kate McCann. For Burn, celebrity is an irresistible force that always leads to obscenity and violence. Written hard, in a style that bears the clear influence of Martin Amis, his second novel, Fullalove (1995), is the memorable ...”