“... that used his services. In March this year, the self-confessed blagger turned whistleblower John Ford revealed the tactics he had used over a period of 15 years up to 2010 to obtain information illegally for newspapers; on one occasion he impersonated William Hague on the phone to get access to his bank account. Many believe that such malpractice ...”

“... a new Laure Prouvost show and Charlie Gard and Call Me by Your Name and cab drivers in Rome and John McCain’s part in the GOP vote to roll back Obamacare. And a year later, almost to the day, here is Crudo – born of accident, on holiday, like a dare – and it is already on the Sunday Times bestseller list. ‘Kathy, by which I mean I,’ it ...”

“... fictive, prospective or real (floods, kidnappings, automobile accidents, the Beast of St John); fairy tales; shopping malls, hospitals, high street stores, dinner parties, graves. All these places and events can break people, or contain those who are broken. She can even put many of these things in the same poem. ‘Sensual Pleasures’ (another new ...”

“... tears’. Kraus herself found the whole business decidedly silly: ‘From the beginning, it took an effort to hide my laughter over the howling.’The Attitudes, and the associated costumes, were expressions of the popular concept of the ‘living statue’. By wearing these dresses, women were styling themselves as figures from antiquity – cold ...”

“... an inmate’s sense of innate differences was often sharpened. When the Irish nationalist activist John Mitchel was transported in 1848, first to the hulks off Bermuda, then to a penal colony in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), one of his greatest torments was the perception that he was being treated no better than a West Indian slave. Escaping to the US, he ...”

“... may be. Even if Mr Saatchi kept his firm’s fees low, which presumably he did not if he took no part in the arrangements, everyone who understands PR can see that this advertising campaign, which has humiliated one of the greatest educational institutions in Britain, has generated publicity for Saatchi and Saatchi. This is not the only obvious ...”

“... War. He insisted that every detail of Alma’s anatomy should be correct, and when he finally took delivery of her replica, it accompanied him everywhere: to restaurants and even to the theatre, where he would book a seat for it. This weird episode is relevant to a letter of 17 April 1928 to Anna Kallin: My friends in Morocco tried various arguments to ...”

“... practice and linguistic innovation made social institutions viable. The lexical expansion ‘took root when botany teachers guided groups of schoolchildren in learning to know nature and distinguish between the various kinds of flowers: and vice versa: those distinctions could be made only with such names in hand. In other words, the social process of ...”

“... best-selling writers, their business is not in the main literary, and in 1972 the prizewinner, John Berger, made a speech in which he expressly deplored what he regarded as the exploitative nature of the donor’s principal interest; indeed he gave half his prize to a revolutionary movement. Other writers have shown some embarrassment but have not, so far ...”

“... comedy of ideas, not the comedy of character, and seems to have said as much to Shelley when he took him to the theatre and vainly tried to persuade him of the superiority of comedy to tragedy and to the portentous gloom of the time. Peacock’s operetta-like ‘novels’ or conversation pieces had a revival in the Twenties and Thirties of this century and ...”

“... word. Trial by ordeal has a long history, even in England. And the judicial carnival which took place at the Old Bailey produced less certainty about who really did what to whom than if Jeremy Thorpe, George Deakin, David Holmes and John Le Mesurier had been invited to take off their shoes and socks and walk along a ...”

“... merely to be pure in heart. Before long, Isherwood too was waving this phrase about as a panacea. John Layard was revered as the one man who was pure in heart, who was therefore without guilt or fear, and consequently unable to contract disease, and who was profoundly, fundamentally happy. When Auden told Isherwood that in Berlin were to be found not only ...”

“... his subject is less clearly focused. But it is an engrossing one. He sets out, in the footsteps of John Harrison, Harvey Gross, William Chace and others, to explain and explore the connections between Modernist literature, as practised by Pound, Eliot and Yeats, and reactionary politics. Others – Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis – could have been included, but ...”

“... the same way that heart, lungs and other physical organs grow to maturity. And the psycholinguist John Marshall has drawn attention to the resemblance between this ‘new organology’ and aspects of phrenological thinking. The educational psychologist Howard Gardner has refurbished the old idea that there are distinct forms of intellectual ability, not just ...”

“... line a mere four million years ago, whereas paleontologists tend to conclude that this event took place 20 million years ago. The arguments between the two schools are fascinating, but I suspect the reliability of both. The paleontologists are short of fossils and long on guesswork. The molecular clock needs its reliability questioning. In this book, it ...”