“... the flight, I had a first interrogation. The old man started by saying: ‘We have two faces, one nice and one ugly. We don’t want to show you the ugly one.’ He carried on with questions: ‘What were you doing in Afghanistan? Are you from al-Qaida? Are you a Taliban? Have you been in training camps?’ My answers were just: no, no, no! He started to ...”

“... silence of another race … Hooey Phooey Sing – Long Sing Tung, that kind of place, where a nice-mannered Jap hisses at you … I saw a Jap gardener at work weeding a huge lawn. He was pulling a piece of weed out of the vast velvet expanse and sneering at it the way Jap gardeners do … He had a sort of dry musty smell, like a fairly clean ...”

“... Most of them were developed under Andrew Adonis’s academies programme for New Labour: the Richard Rogers-designed Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney, which opened in 2004, is one of these, as is Zaha Hadid’s Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton. The programme was launched in 2000 by the then education secretary, David Blunkett, who explained that if ...”

“... account of his childhood, given the suggestiveness of these incidents. Florence added a few nice episodes, illustrating, for example, his fear of being touched as a boy and in adult life, and it’s sad that these are now buried in the notes at the back, along with her descriptions of Hardy’s appearance and Max Gate. Hardy’s amazement as a child ...”

“... set within a shopping mall, Grand Central, which blurs into another shopping mall, the Bull Ring. Richard Vinen, writing the first serious history of Birmingham in a long while, is aware of how hard it is to pin the city down, to explain what it is or what it is for. Planners in the 1960s, he says, ‘were sometimes perplexed as to why Birmingham had been ...”

“... holiday she could remember. ‘Dear Mr Gamlin,’ Blyton wrote the next day. ‘Thank you for your nice letter. It all sounds very interesting but I ought to warn you of something you obviously don’t know, but which has been well known in the literary and publishing world for some time – I and my stories are completely banned by the BBC as far as children ...”

“... all too close who also stages something in the nature of a magical disappearing act. Here is Richard Gere interviewed – although that is not quite the right word – by Cameron Docherty in the Independent last June:He is as elusive as smoke. Restless and edgy, he paces around the marble floor of his Malibu home wondering why people are always curious ...”

“... on populations, such a stance is time-consuming but indispensable. The South African jurist Richard Goldstone, the tribunal’s second appointed prosecutor, who saved it from an early demise and made it a court to be reckoned with, remarks in his foreword to Archbold: ‘There were no precedents on which we could rely. We came from many legal ...”

“... ones that I really wrote from experience and not projecting myself into a situation and writing a nice story about it, which I always found phony’ – ‘third-person songs about people who lived in concrete flats and things’. The emphasis now is on a music that comes from the inside, no virtuosity, none of the courtesies of ‘projection’, no more ...”

“... Arrian, curiously cut short. And what has happened to the famous description of Tyre? It would be nice to know, at any rate, what was so distasteful about the inscription that Alexander wrote on the ship he dedicated to Heracles after the conquest, ‘either his own composition or someone else’s, but not worth recording. That is the reason I myself didn’t ...”

“... was bestowed still the greatest honour that could have come my way.15 February. Good reviews for Richard Wilson’s production of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at Sheffield. In such a violent play, though, I find myself spiked by my literalness (as I remember being by Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking). If a character is mutilated on stage, blinded, say, or ...”

“... the subject up. ‘How’s the leg, Sacks?’ he asked, tapping the cast. ‘You’ve done a nice job,’ I replied, ‘but it doesn’t seem quite right.’ ‘Why, what’s the matter? Is it painful?’ ‘Well, not exactly. I am afraid it sounds silly, but ... but it seems to have no tone, and I can’t really feel it or move it.’ I saw an ...”

“... male previous tenant, a distinguished-looking chap, inspected the bottle and said it was a very nice wine but – with a propitiatory laugh – he preferred Burgundy. I said that for my part I didn’t much care for the way he was dressed. He smiled awkwardly and blushed. A certain coolness then ensued, to tell the truth, and conversation flagged. The not ...”

“... parts of Henry VI, which we are now invited to refer to as The First Part of the Contention and Richard Duke of York – 1 Henry VI comes later, after Titus Andronicus. The two parts of Henry IV are similarly split by The Merry Wives, which shows how fiercely attentive to chronology we are required to be. For simplicity’s sake, the following remarks on ...”

“... Opera became a sensitive field of ideological possibilities: the traditions associated with Richard Wagner, in particular, had to be reassessed in the withering light of Nazism, while in Italy the revival – begun under Mussolini as part of a nationalist cultural policy – of an apparently dead repertory of early 19th-century works led to a vogue for ...”