“... Acker having friendships with some peers and contemporaries, Jeanette Winterson, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, Geoff Ryman, Kaveney herself; but she was susceptible to ‘Ackerlites’ and could herself be a bit of a climber and a user. ‘Neil remarked … that I was more important to Kathy than I realised,’ Kaveney writes. ‘You were her trophy weird ...”

“... as having ‘very poor recollection of the events’. Yet she found in favour of the firm: her 32-page judgment found that, since Maguire had yielded to pressure to do the same dangerous thing in the past, it couldn’t be dangerous. Maguire described one meeting that took place after the incident and before his sacking where Park told him it was pointless to ...”

“... portraits of Roth in his former lover Janet Hobhouse’s The Furies, his former protégé Alan Lelchuk’s Ziff: A Life? and his former protégée-lover Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry – it may feel at times as if we’ve made this expedition before, with Claire Bloom hovering overhead.But buoyancy carries the reader along even in the thick of ...”

“... respected for finding him entirely abominable. The Guardian tried to soothe him – its editor, Alan Rusbridger, showed concern for his position, as did the then deputy, Ian Katz, and others – but he talked about its journalists in savage terms. The Guardian felt strongly that the secret material ought to be redacted to protect informants or bystanders ...”

“... it sit in their bank earning interest. Take a look at the balance sheet, however, and at the page after page of corporate reports and footnotes which accompany it, and it’s a different story. High levels of deposits mean high levels of liabilities; and high levels of liabilities oblige a bank to have high levels of ...”

“... concluded that Britain could be more free-market than America. He had a powerful ally in Alan Walters, Thatcher’s economic adviser, and when it came to the first of the big privatisations – the sale of British Telecom – Littlechild was commissioned to come up with new rules for governing the private companies on which the country would depend ...”

“... from England before its accession to the Common Market, in the pioneering reconstruction of Alan Milward.This has finally changed. In the last decade Europe has generated a set of thinkers about its integration who command the field, while the US, increasingly absorbed in itself, has largely vacated it. Among these, one stands out. By reason of both the ...”

“... of rushing about that I certainly couldn’t control and didn’t even desire. A nice boy called Alan Mindel slipped on some polished linoleum as he raced around, hit his chin on the veneer of a rosewood dressing-table, and had to have a couple of stitches put in. My mother reacted with fury and gave me a beating in front of several guests. My father reacted ...”

“... of financial deregulation and credit expansion, even its architects now more or less admit – see Alan Greenspan. Intertwined across the Atlantic, European banks and real estate operations were as deeply involved in the debacle as their American counterparts. In the EU, however, this general crisis was overdetermined by another peculiar to the Union, the ...”

“... what Satoshi should be at the moment, it’s crazy.’NinjutsuWright’s​ father, Frederick Page Wright, was a forward scout in Vietnam, serving with the 8th Battalion of the Australian army. ‘He lost all his friends,’ Wright told me, ‘every single one of them’ – and before long he was drinking and being violent towards Wright’s mother, who ...”

“... she tried to gather herself for a final push. ‘Please pray for me,’ she wrote on her Facebook page. ‘There’s a fire in my council block. I can’t leave the flat. Please pray for me and my mum.’Some people never got out of bed, the fumes killing them while they slept. This seems to have been the fate of Ligaya Moore, a 78-year-old woman who came ...”