“... its own space, and which populated it with judges who, although titular lords, no longer had to be peers, made provision for appointment to the new Supreme Court to be open to any lawyer of more than 15 years’ standing. (It failed to take the opportunity to make leading legal academics eligible – a gateway which, for ...”

“... Although he lived with pain for the rest of his life, he was amazingly lucky to survive at all. By the end of the day, of the twenty officers in Tawney’s battalion, ten were dead and eight wounded; of 754 men, 120 were killed, 241 wounded and 111 missing. Twenty thousand British soldiers died that day on the Somme.If one were to search for an experience ...”

“... and Fall of al-Qaida mentions Syria just once, as the home of Osama bin Laden’s mother. Today, by contrast, Syria is widely – and correctly – seen as the cradle of a resurgent al-Qaida: a magnet for jihadist recruits, which offers the networks, skills and motivation needed to produce a new generation of terrorists. How did this happen? And why did it ...”

“... the banner the Oaklanders brought, she told me, because she and her co-organisers had tried to be careful about messaging. But the words FUCK OFF GOOGLE in giant letters on a purple sheet held up in front of a blockaded Google bus gladdened the hearts of other San Franciscans. That morning – it was Tuesday, 21 January – about fifty locals were also ...”

“... believe that what you’re watching really happened until the relentless inhumanity is interrupted by an occasional human moment. At one point a gunman walks down a row of kneeling young men with their hands tied behind them. He aims a pistol at the back of each man’s head, fires, watches the body slump forward in a pool of blood, moves on to the next in ...”

“... liar (please quote)’, and, she suspected, ‘on the bottle again’. Still, Schiff can’t be faulted for underscoring the difficulty of capturing a stable image of his subject, a difficulty that’s continued to cling to her work since her death, at 88, in 2006. Spark’s novels – she wrote 22 of them – aren’t easily mistaken for anyone ...”

“... graduate work in political science and wrote novels before he became a TV producer.’ Mortified by his exile, he asked other people from the series what had happened. ‘They laughed and said that the moment I showed Huggins the outline, I was no longer the Duke professor who was going to honour his creation by making it ...”

“... In August 1867, Thomas Carlyle published one of his most virulent diatribes against ‘swarmery’, by which he meant the trend towards democracy. The immediate inspiration for ‘Shooting Niagara: and After?’ was the threat of Disraeli’s Reform Act, which would double the number of adult males entitled to vote, and thus, as Carlyle saw it, unleash untold ‘new supplies of blockheadism, gullibility, bribability, [and] amenability to beer and balderdash’: look at America, the beleaguered Sage of Chelsea argued, and its absurd Civil War, prompted by what he derisively called ‘the Nigger Question’: Essentially the Nigger Question was one of the smallest; and in itself did not much concern mankind in the present time of struggles and hurries ...”

“... Decade, the 1970s was the only decade except for the 1930s during which Americans grew poorer. By the late 1960s, around a quarter of all new investment by US companies in electrical and non-electrical machinery, transportation equipment, rubber and chemical manufacturing was being made abroad. As the new decade began ...”

“... is more significant and also more mysterious. They have been the subject of two previous books, by Mollie Gillen (1972) and David Hanrahan (2008), both called The Assassination of the Prime Minister. Linklater doesn’t add much information or evidence about the event itself, but he puts it in context, and provides ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... get a good press and have since disappeared from the shelves, while Moravia’s earlier work will be a part of Italian education for decades to come. Translating, I was struck by the almost cavalier perfunctoriness of the late books, combined with a ruthless narrative dispatch. The weightiest themes were tossed off with an ...”