“... a non-urgent urgency. What happens happens: shaped word clusters frolicking between generous white margins. Speed-reading is the preferred option, but speed-reading in slow motion. In Lion Lion there is even a poem called ‘The "Speed” Novel’. but you should take those layers off so it can be just imagination – the ‘speed’ novel discussion of ...”

“... through correspondence with people she never met or hadn’t seen for years. (Among them was Patrick O’Brian, another writer in flight from England, who dedicated his fourth Aubrey-Maturin novel, The Mauritius Command, to her.) Otherwise, she had little interest in the literary world. When she encountered a group of writers in Athens in 1962, the poet ...”

“... office workers, and street gangs pretending they are riding with Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Patrick Wright, in Passport to Peking, quotes the Labour politician Morgan Phillips, who visited China as part of a delegation in 1954. ‘As I saw the great mass of cycles on the road I was reminded of a day in Bedford during the last war … The workers were ...”

“... no vice-chancellor enthroned in Convocation waiting to take your voting paper and lift his hat as Patrick Neill tipped his twenty years ago. Now Neill is himself a candidate in what feels more like a local council election, with trestle tables, ushers and the proctors taking the votes. One of Tom Bingham’s proposers, I vote for him and no one else, the ...”

“... most notably the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, which was set up in 1965 by means of a white paper and was therefore the creation entirely of the executive, and the City Panel on Takeovers and Mergers, a voluntary body forming part of the City of London’s means of self-regulation. The power to review the exercise of the Royal Prerogative was ...”

“... The way to match the Trump pace is by tweeting; but that is to play his game – a gambit the White House press corps have found irresistible. Much of the damage to US politics over the last two years has been done by the anti-Trump media themselves, with their mood of perpetual panic and their lack of imagination. But the uncanny gift of Trump is an ...”

“... at school, a jersey and skirt at training college, ‘my schizophrenic fancy dress’, a ‘white smock, white shoes and a starched cap’, things made of weird new fabrics such as ‘everglaze’, a longed-for skirt of ‘terylene’ with permanent pleats, a ‘dull green overcoat’, the slacks Sargeson preferred ...”

“... in 1960s London, and his grandfather, Bruno, was one of the principal designers of the White City estate in northern Berlin, one of a cluster of social housing projects from the Weimar era to be given a Unesco World Heritage listing. It is a commonplace that modern architecture in Britain, as an ideology, was an import from interwar Central Europe ...”

“... for my family and for my staff. No lawyer in Northern Ireland can forget what happened to Patrick Finucane ... the allegations of official collusion in his murder are particularly disturbing and can only be resolved by an independent inquiry into his murder, as has been recommended by the UN Special Rapporteur ... ‘Another reason why RUC officers ...”

“... grasp,’ as he put it, always citing Ambassador ‘Chet’ Cooper, who was the point-man for the White House in these supposed talks. In the LBJ archives, old ‘Chet’ is quoted as saying: ‘He didn’t have peace within his grasp, he was always overly optimistic about it ... The US Administration regarded Wilson at best as marginal, at worst as a ...”

“... presaging lunch at Marshall and Snelgrove’s and tea at Fortnum’s’. Instead ‘girls with white faces and heavily kohled eyes hurried out towards Praed Street’ – the book is best read with a streetfinder close to hand – ‘as if hastening to appointments with abortionists in seedy consulting rooms behind the Edgware Road’. Alas, times have ...”

“... Club for not wearing a tie, and how he then had lunch in the canteen at the back with Sir Patrick Nairne, who becomes ‘Pat’ thereafter. Clearly, Donnison was successful in getting many of the reforms he wanted: for example, the relative value of benefits was published in the SBC Notes and News, and in the annual Supplementary Benefits review, in ...”

“... some beech trees the car turns a corner and I catch sight of a Presbyterian meeting-house – white, shining, Neoclassical, two gold Greek letters above the door. He’s in a rush so I don’t ask to go back and look at this living image of the Ulster Enlightenment. I don’t remember ever having noticed it before. Later that day I’m walking along Ozone ...”

“... and Bessarabia, and in towns where the large numbers working in universities, the professions and white-collar jobs aroused resentment. Native, endemic and matter-of-fact, anti-Jewish prejudice now became frenzied, and the student outbursts were brutal. In the spring of 1932, rioting closed down the university in Bucharest, and precipitated the dissolution of ...”

“... caution and sometimes undermining her. In the wake of his trial, his camp – mostly middle-aged white men impatient for a second referendum – have pitted themselves against Sturgeon and her backers, whom they dismiss as ‘the wokerati’.The committee appointed by the Scottish Parliament to inquire into the Scottish government’s mishandling of its ...”