“... account says Pakistan), and forced to undergo a virginity test, Heshu was threatened with a gun by her father but saved, on this occasion, by her mother and brother. After the family’s return to England, her brother discovered letters in which she repeated her desire to escape. She was locked in her room and stabbed to ...”

“... been any great pre or postwar Jewish shoe mavins they would certainly have been pointed out to me by my parents, who identified any Jewish achiever in any sphere as one of the family: Alma Cogan, Einstein, Marx, boxing promoter Jack Solomons (the Sultan of Sock), it didn’t matter what they were known for, everyone counted. Even, like the Kray Twins, a ...”

“... of Military Justice and Nato’s Visiting Forces Act; theoretically, in a time of war, we could be shot. I had first met Harry Pincus, the charismatic founder of our station, when we were both volunteer ‘barefoot doctors’ at R.D. Laing’s Kingsley Hall, a halfway house for psychotics in the East End. One night, when Harry was ambushed ...”

“... and, on the other, the ‘external’ world that the creature lives in is sufficiently robust to be getting on with; and that commerce between the two, both in perception and in action, is typically ‘indirect’, where that means something like ‘mediated by thought’. But plausible as that may seem, the thesis of Andy ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Axler, ‘the last of the best of the classical American stage actors’, is suddenly abandoned by his talent. No reason is given – there is no reason – and Axler suffers a breakdown, aggravated by his inability to believe even in the sincerity of his own collapse. Overwhelmed, his wife leaves him. Alone with a ...”

“... better than the wealthy,’ she wrote, ‘but their manners and forms are always being interrupted by necessity. The mystery of existence is always showing through the texture of their ordinary lives, and I’m afraid that this makes them irresistible to the novelist.’ Wells Tower demonstrates a similar affinity in his collection of short stories, Everything ...”

“... after the models of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens and H.D., would cause her to be left behind as the age moved towards a model of political and feminist poetries. But her 500-page Collected Poems belongs among the achievements of 20th-century modernism, a sphere overlapping almost nowhere with the mimetic, anecdotal, psychologically ...”

“... story of the Colorado River and the attempts to determine what dreams it licenses and which must be left unwatered, as it snakes through much of the major non-fiction of the West. The river begins in Colorado with tributaries reaching up into Wyoming and they gather force and volume as they rush through the magnificent canyons they carved in Utah and ...”

“... class divide is alive and well. A reporter from the BBC has even had fun touring the Tory estates by helicopter. We laugh, but it is dragging us all down.  A long, sad, whispered conversation with a senior cabinet member who has decided not to contest the election, which means he will have to stand down come the reshuffle in a few weeks. ‘I’m in a job I ...”

“... Ransome, when he turned up, proved to be an amiable and attractive man, with a luxuriant blond soup-strainer moustache, a rubicund complexion, a large mouth from which more often than not a pipe protruded, and a hearty disposition.’ Malcolm Muggeridge immediately took to Arthur Ransome when he first met him in Cairo in 1929 ...”

“... reluctance to specify where the cuts might fall – both in expenditure and, if there are to be any, in taxation. We have heard more about what is to be ‘ring-fenced’ – health, defence, perhaps education, almost certainly law and order – than what is to go, and more about taxes that won’t ...”

“... observed, talk of perfectly round circles and perfectly straight lines, neither of which are to be found in the sensible world. The same is true of numbers, since they must be composed of perfectly equal units. The objects studied by mathematicians must therefore exist in another ...”

“... an air of strenuously contained bedlam. Public notices in Finnish look as if they were produced by pogoing on a typewriter. Bank staff, waitresses, children, even the drunks, have the air of Marks & Spencer management trainees. Matti Vanhanen, Finland’s cyborg-like teetotal prime minister, survived in office after ditching his mistress via text message ...”

“... During the break-up with Kimberly Quinn that precipitated his break-up with the Home Office, David Blunkett is reported to have warned her: ‘The law is on my side. I know because I made the law.’ It doesn’t quite have the melodramatic chill of Judge Dredd’s ‘I am the law,’ but it comes close. And it’s easy to imagine Blunkett saying it, for it nicely sums up the tragically self-important view he took of himself, and of the executive branch of government, during his time in office ...”