“... to think that what you were about wasn’t simply a mixture of drudgery, discomfort and William Bootlike perplexity; that you’d get back to London in a week, or a month, and sit on one of her twin sofas at about 6:30 as the sun dropped slowly into the frame of the picture-window, daubing the flat with warm reds and tans (‘Why don’t you close ...”

“... poets and seekers. Heavily dosed on Gertrude Stein, and fired up by a chance encounter with William Carlos Williams, Welch was confirmed in his destiny as an outsider, a casual labourer, cab driver, fisherman, backwoods hermit. He had his task, as writer and recorder, but, unlike Snyder, he never found his place. One day, according to rumour, he walked ...”

“... tactile authority, few rivals outside the work of DeLillo, Pynchon and (more to his own taste) William Gibson. And, as in their novels, local observation in Jameson was complemented by an implacable awareness of what he called the ‘unrepresentable exterior’ enclosing all the slick and streaming phenomena in view. In the novelists, however, allusion to ...”

“... to destabilise Syria and that these efforts continued into the Obama years. In December 2006, William Roebuck, then in charge of the US embassy in Damascus, filed an analysis of the ‘vulnerabilities’ of the Assad government and listed methods ‘that will improve the likelihood’ of opportunities for destabilisation. He recommended that Washington ...”

“... George Lewes (though Jane refused to have Mary Ann Evans in the house), Lady Harriet Baring and William Bingham Baring, Charles and Erasmus Darwin, Margaret Fuller, Ruskin, Ellen Twisleton, Margaret Oliphant, Froude: practically everybody, or at least practically everybody who either liked to talk or could bear, as Carlyle grew into stentorian middle ...”

“... election of Arnold Schwarzenegger. California, in so many obvious ways, has run out of steam, cash and character. It’s a prime moment for Cassandra, if not the Terminator. But anyone who has been reading Didion for forty years will know that she was born with haunting doubts about her homeland and its legend. She was using Yeats to warn that the centre ...”

“... centre. There is a reason this place had to go, even before the interests of real estate and cash-poor councils were taken into consideration, and that reason is: Jane Jacobs says no. This injunction can be traced back to the epiphany Jacobs experienced as a freelance journalist in Philadelphia in the mid-1950s when she visited new housing estates and ...”

“... she was the youngest ever female MP when she was elected in 1969 at the age of 21. The Reverend William McCrea of the DUP was elected in 1983, seeing Sinn Féin off by just 78 votes. He was renowned for being one of Westminster’s most absent MPs: he spent his time in Nashville recording religious country and western songs. A minister of Ian Paisley’s ...”

“... predicted. The companies paid out generous dividends to shareholders and were still swimming in cash. Littlechild could have stepped in to lower prices, but he held back, fearful of intruding on managers’ RPI-X nirvana. When he did act, the stock market found the price cuts he ordered so laughably mild that the companies’ share prices shot up. In ...”

“... people do with their spouses and children, their fellow-workers, the tools of their trade, the cash accounts of their businesses, the possessions they accumulate in their homes, the music they listen to, the sports they play or watch, or the trees they pass on their way to work. Anything from the sound of a word to the colour of a leaf to the feel of a ...”

“... who had set out a few weeks before to cross the Pyrenees into Spain, carrying a large sum of cash for de Gaulle. He didn’t learn until the end of the war that Jacques never made it past the frontier. His passeur Lazare Cabrero, a Spanish republican, shot him in the head, took his money and buried his body. A decade later, the corpse was discovered and ...”

“... out but for you – I believe we shall owe her life to you, even.’ Vivienne accepted gifts of cash, the occasional piece of family jewellery, dancing lessons and expensive clothing, including, according to Ottoline, silk underwear. Being a skilled typist, she helped in the preparation of several of Russell’s manuscripts, which provided further occasions ...”

“... Tories said once before that Britain was becoming a foreign land,’ he wrote, referring to William Hague in 2001. ‘We told those who agreed that if they came with us we would give them back their country. As we found, there is no future in that kind of approach for a party that aspires to govern, or appeal beyond a disgruntled minority. We cannot ...”

“... Potter Trivia Evening; it had a Christmas card competition, and one girl was picked to meet Prince William. The school leadership is new, the trust that oversees the running of the school has a new name and the school itself will shortly get a new name too; the most recent monitoring visit from Ofsted showed definite progress. But schools know they are in ...”

“... the rest of Hong Kong, ‘ceded in perpetuity’, back to mother China. That lion-hearted Liberal William Ewart Gladstone, who died while he was trying to solve the Irish Question, said of the First Opium War, which ended with Hong Kong under British rule: ‘a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with ...”