“... great American film directors have suffered from a common predicament. Democratic fealty and, more important, financial constraint meant they were bound to respect popular taste. That requirement need not have been oppressive – silent movies, after all, were descendants of the popular fiction of Balzac and Dickens. What dampened the spirits of all but ...”

“... also one of failure. It is hard to decide what part of him came first. Was the colour of his skin more important than his sexuality? Was his religious upbringing more important than his reading of the American masters? Were his sadness and anger more important than his love of ...”

“... elected to Parliament as the member for Chingford, a distance of about three miles. Ponders End is more of a transport collision than a settlement and nobody needs much political arm-twisting to move on. Probably the best account of the place is found in a Gerald Kersh novel, Fowler’s End (1957). A character, setting out to locate this uncelebrated railway ...”

“... rumoured to be on offer from somewhere between £30 million and £50 million a shot? One of the more outrageous selling points is a promised ‘clear day’ vision of the North Sea fishing fleet 44 miles downriver from this pyramid lighthouse. In promotional photographs some of the private baths on the upper decks look competition-sized. Wet rooms are like ...”

“... called them. If he failed to understand her, Hughes understood the poems. He was – perhaps even more primarily than being her earthly husband – their reader. And he writes finely of how she did it, with the clear eye that knows. She was always having a big coffee idea of what to name a collection or one of her characters and it was always terrible; this ...”

“... a contradictory existence, though I never had any doubts which side I was on. The other side was more fun; they laughed and they joked, but one learned a great deal from trade-union and railway workers’ leaders, who treated me as an adult from quite a young age. I’d say, ‘What’s going on?’ and they’d explain: ‘This is what’s going on ...”

“... in 1968, at the age of eight. In several of the cases, officers kept their fake identities for more than ten years and exploited them in sexual situations. To strengthen their ‘backstory’, they would visit the places of their ‘childhood’, walking around the houses they had lived in before they died, all the better to implant the legend of their ...”

“... Tippett was enthusing about English Renaissance music – Henry Purcell, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Tallis – twenty years before the Early Music revival of the 1950s. He came to revere Beethoven and Stravinsky, adored the visionary American composer Charles Ives, and distrusted the postcard folksiness of British composers like Finzi and Delius. When it ...”

“... Walser? (Ooooh errrg blush, ahem, little cough, um: No, I’m ashamed to say . . .) Had I read Thomas Bernhard? (Yes! – Yes, I have! ‘Wittgenstein’s Nephew’! Yay! Yippee! Wow! Phew! – dodged the bullet that time!) It seemed, for a while at least, that I had yet to be contaminated by the shocking intellectual mediocrity surrounding me at Stanford ...”

“... at the age of 30 has a 20 per cent likelihood of marriage, at 35 a 5 per cent chance, and at 40 no more than a 1.3 per cent chance.’ The ‘study’ was an immediate hit. It was discussed in newspapers, on television news and talk shows, and in movies, magazines, advertisements and greeting cards. The message was clear. Educated women were to feel ...”

“... Macron and Judith Butler), and his concepts – the postcolony, necropolitics, Afropolitanism and more – crop up everywhere from the Venice Biennale to newspapers and advertising briefs. It is perhaps surprising that such widespread acclaim has been given to a writer who is notoriously difficult to read. Mbembe has been accused of writing at a ...”

“... is a novel about Irish dancers on tour with a Michael Flatley figure whose influence grows more sinister over time. Pounds of verbal oil will be poured into his perm; his bulge will almost rupture his trousers. His backstory – but surely you can picture it. One dancer is addicted to weed, another feels like he doesn’t belong, and eventually Michael ...”

“... lie suggests that the bodies were deposited whole and decomposed in situ. The chambers measure more than two metres deep, to the top of the sediment at the base. The chamber openings are too small for an adult to manoeuvre in and out easily, and there certainly isn’t enough space for an adult to climb inside with a ladder, so the evidence suggests that ...”

“... Even the low end of 100 tons of agent would enable Saddam Hussein to cause mass casualties across more than 100 square miles of territory, an area nearly five times the size of Manhattan.’ I heard him say: ‘Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based ...”

“... the strength of its ties with the US, the UK showed scant interest in the Schuman Plan, and little more in the preparations for the Treaty of Rome at Messina five years later. The future of the world, so it believed, lay in Anglo-American hegemony. It was not until after the shock of American desertion at Suez and the re-election in 1959 of a Conservative ...”