“... I used to go to clandestine meetings in his room in the House, where an ill-assorted group – Christopher Price, David Owen, John Mackintosh, Jack Ashley and myself – drank whisky and talked devaluation. When devaluation finally came, I hoped he would become Chancellor of the Exchequer. When he did not, I hoped – incredible as it seems in retrospect ...”

“... They looked to Lord Braxfield, who is introduced by Royle as another in his gallery of homespun, black-a-vised, bad-mouthed worthies. Before transporting Muir, he stated: ‘A Government in every country should be just like a Corporation: and, in this country, it is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a right to be represented; as for the ...”

“... an ‘undiscovered country’ and the title-page of Vesalius’s great work accordingly features Christopher Columbus, gesturing knowingly towards the dissected corpse, as if to reinforce the words of Sir Thomas Browne: ‘We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.’ Echoes of the notion that psychological ...”

“... trade’. The picture shows Wittgenstein walking down the street with a young man wearing a black raincoat. It was originally published in Wittgenstein: Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten, edited by Michael Nedo and Michele Ranchetti, with the caption: Wittgenstein mit dem Freund Ben Richards in London. In the article I dismiss as absurd the idea that ...”

“... standing, clutching a cup of coffee and trying to read Anthony Powell: A Life, the book with the black and white photo of a grumpy man in tweeds on the cover. How Powell would have hated it, I thought, while squatting; all of us going about our little lives in the cramped, blue-upholstered domestic departure lounges of this world. For like most people with ...”

“... the unexpectedly supple grasp of idiom. On the evidence of these diaries, the flight-recorder, the black box present in all writers, was particularly efficient in Joe Orton. In his plays, the tapes are doctored and played at impossible speeds to produce situations which are heightened, undifferentiated and much less interesting – a scream, in fact. Orton ...”

“... equivalent of dole money. His experiences in the Scotswood district of Newcastle, an unemployment black spot, led him to see something cruelly mistaken in Tebbit’s jibes that the long-term unemployed were somehow deficient in personal responsibility. Whereas Tebbit thought the unemployed should ‘get on their bikes’ to look for work, or, if none was to ...”

“... investigation, it emerged that Doheny’s son had delivered $100,000 to Fall ‘in a little black bag’. It was corruption at the highest levels of government. The Senate hearings began in October 1923 and on 5 June 1924 Doheny was formally indicted. Fall was convicted of accepting the bribe, becoming the first American cabinet member to spend time in ...”

“... movies, which tattooed the message that violence and evil were causeless and random, punching black holes into the humdrum everyday; his assertion that the absence of helicopter parenting and 1970s pop culture’s ‘diet of grit’ helped toughen up sensibilities, preparing one for the adult world of hard knocks and cheating disappointments; and his ...”

“... on this walk we were accompanied by our Jack Russell instead of my usual black dog. Child and dog slept heavily, but I scrunched up by the small window, smoking illegally and staring out to the northwest where the sodium-lit realm of the airport showed up as an orange nimbus against the purple night sky. In the morning, David Cameron ...”

“... virgin territory. The space had once been a community art venture called King Ubu, operated by the Black Mountain poet Robert Duncan and his collagist partner Jess Collins. Duncan, removing his clothes at the conclusion of his verse play Faust Foutu, in order to demonstrate the meaning of nakedness, anticipated by a decade or so the Ginsberg party trick that ...”

“... phone booths used as urinals, the entire city as a running sore – finds its locus in a soigné black pickpocket in a camel-hair coat who, as the pièce de résistance after isolating and robbing Sammler, forces the old man to look down as he exposes himself. Quite a production is made of the Unbuttoning, and the organ itself is prosed with an exotic plump ...”

“... earlier. A comparable mistake today, Johnson believed, could leave twenty million dead instantly. Christopher Clark’s breathtakingly good book is, much more self-consciously than Tuchman’s, also a history for its – that is, our – times. An act of terrorism in Sarajevo – the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife ...”

“... and Veronika Weiss. Rodger then went on a drive-by shooting spree through Isla Vista, killing Christopher Michaels-Martinez, also a student at UCSB, with a single bullet to the chest inside a Deli Mart, and wounding 14 others. He eventually crashed his BMW coupé at an intersection. He was found dead by the police, having shot himself in the head. In the ...”

“... by heart: ‘In overthrowing me, you have cut down in San Domingo only the trunk of the tree of black liberty. It will spring up again by the roots for they are numerous and deep.’ In November 1803 the former slaves won what proved to be the war’s final battle, and on 1 January 1804 declared the independent republic of Haiti. It was Latin America’s ...”