“... teabut most of all I like to talk about me.The American poet Wallace Stevens liked his tea – he took to it in connoisseurship and prudence, ‘imported tea’ every afternoon, ‘with some little tea wafers’, partly in order to ease himself off martinis (Elsie, his ‘Pam’, disapproved of his drinking) – but otherwise everything is different. He was ...”

“... writers are punk,’ he told Linson, ‘but they get the tin.’ But a potboiler about war took a cynical focus which Crane couldn’t maintain. The Century articles told him everything about a battle except what it was like. ‘I wonder,’ he said to Linson, ‘that some of these fellows don’t tell how they felt in those scraps.’ He circled the ...”

“... work was an Indian mathematician, Krishna Varikooty. Boisterousness that would have horrified John Pierpont Morgan was tolerated. At one gathering in Florida, one of the team’s managers broke his nose when drunken colleagues were pushing him into a hotel swimming-pool. The team’s pivotal innovation, introduced in December 1997, was a deal they called ...”

“... phylactery shouted out by Verres’ victims pleading for a stay of crucifixion), recycled by John F. Kennedy with unavoidable bathos as ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ This great and by no means guaranteed victory against the establishment, as well as the addition of an entire province to his list of clients, helped ease Cicero’s way. But as consul he was ...”

“... about Dante we know largely because he was embroiled in public life and because his writing always took a position on the political situation of the moment. What makes the going hard is how complicated the politics were, how much they depended on an intricate network of family relationships, and how ambiguous and mobile Dante’s loyalties were within the ...”

“... about social and spiritual progress. Carpenter was born in 1844 and attended Cambridge, where he took orders and had sexual dreams about his fellow students. Having left Cambridge, unhappy with its stuffiness, he began to give lectures to working men and women in the North of England. Eventually he moved to Sheffield where, having inherited capital on the ...”

“... of its offices: ‘At this location, 122 Commerce Street, was a very large warehouse owned by John Murphey, who provided support to the slave traders in the city.’ ‘I would have preferred not to have the additional markers,’ the mayor confessed, ‘but I believe they are part of history.’ He agreed to allow them, he said, because they would ...”

“... sergeant major is a can of McEwens lager.10 March. The Independent pursues its campaign against John Birt over his tax arrangements. On another page it boasts its acquisition of Jim Slater as its Stock Exchange commentator.13 March. To Weston to see Mam, who is dulleyed, expressionless, absent. The sun is hot through the blinds and the radio full ...”

“... duly formed democratic assemblies and experimented with organic agriculture; female members took leadership roles. The goal was to incubate self-governed Kurdish institutions within the Turkish state, resorting to violence only if their autonomy was threatened. ‘We will put Bookchin’s ideas into practice as the first society that establishes a ...”

“... cannot be unseen’.Certainly Schmitt couldn’t unsee it, though he turned it on its head. He took Bosch to be a painter of enmity, not love, and understood the prime enemy in The Garden to be ‘the egomaniac’, as figured in the central panel of human commingling: ‘This is nature and natural law, suspension of self-alienation and self-externalisation ...”

“... uncannily familiar figure of my old acquaintance the doctor, Buñuel’s pal José-Luis Barros. It took me a while to place the recognised face, and of course I didn’t fill in all the details even then. A few years later I met Buñuel in Mexico. He was delighted when I told him the story – he loved coincidences – and thought it would have been even ...”

“... targeted the kitchen first, and acquired a few ginger biscuits which were too hard to bite into. I took them upstairs and placed them under my pillow. I moved on to the other rooms, all of which had the same indifferent smell of absence. In the master bedroom, I found a jewellery box sitting on a vanity table. It was empty, but gradually, I found some treasure ...”

“... disincentive to illegal entry than any man-made obstacle. Border vigilance in its present form took shape in the 1990s under the first Clinton administration. In 1993 the Border Patrol in Texas reacted to large numbers of illegal crossings near El Paso with high-profile reinforcement. Operation Gatekeeper, designed to stem illegal migrant flows at San ...”

“... September, and had made an additional $72 million in 2001 from his stock options.) On 25 July, John Rigas, the former head of Adelphia Communications, was arrested, along with his two sons, on corporate crime charges. They were accused of using the company ‘as the Rigas family’s personal piggy-bank’, spending hundreds of millions of the ...”

“... the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall. Everywhere the ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ of the ...”