“... constituted a growing proportion of the population and why the eminent Presbyterian Richard Baxter was convinced that a large proportion of those ‘born of Christian Parents’ had ‘banished’ faith from their ‘Hearts and Lives’. Often described as ‘worldlings’, these were people who denied God less in thoughts and words than in ...”

“... the narrator, Eily, gets so anxious giving a blowjob that she makes her actor-boyfriend recite Richard III to get her through it:Nowisthewinterofourdiscontentmadeglorioussummerbythissonofyork and allthecloudsthatloured upon our house inthedeepbosomofthe ocean     burrrrieeeed nowareourbrowsboundwithvictoriouswreaths …Characters use their bodies to get ...”

“... day after the annual holiday commemorating the October revolution. On the floor of the exhibition hall of the institute, among the wreckage of the exhibition itself – including Pushkin’s death mask, broken into several pieces – lies the lifeless body of Lyova Odoevtsev, whose history Bitov then relates. Born at the height of the Stalinist terror in ...”

“... Elsewhere he notes the exclusion of the vernacular, the dialects of business, trade, music-hall, barrack-room, bar-room and those professional discourses not represented in the old universities. The OED has generally disregarded the lower classes and their rich argots, and relegated women and minorities as providers of source ...”

“... The Cradle Will Rock and attaches suitable significance to Welles’s 1941 Broadway staging of Richard Wright’s Native Son, which was no less daring than Citizen Kane. In any case, it would be impossible to ignore politics when writing about Welles’s wartime activities, and especially the ill-fated government-subsidised documentary It’s All True, the ...”

“... Azzam has a ‘golf training room’. The late Omani sultan’s 155-metre Al Said has a concert hall with room for a fifty-piece orchestra. Sheikh Muhammad al-Maktoum’s eponymous Dubai (162 metres) accommodates a disco and a squash court. At 134 metres, Serene, the yacht owned by the Saudi enfant terrible, Mohammed bin Salman, is only the 24th largest in ...”

“... down through the South-West and the South, back to New York and New England. The Bowery dance hall, Niagara Falls and Grand Canyon as tourist attractions, the segregated South, the college campus – these are the springboards for her efforts to comprehend the deep structure of the American world. A left-wing Tocqueville, she is struck by the paradox of ...”

“... what he has accomplished. 24 February. To a Faber meeting for their sales reps at the Butchers’ Hall, which is just by the back door of Barts, bombed presumably and rebuilt in undistinguished neo-Georgian some time in the 1960s. Doorman sullen and no advertisement for the supposed cheerfulness of the butchering profession. Early so have a chance to look at ...”

“... John Seely, Lord Mottistone. In spirit, if not detail, it is heir to Colen Campbell’s Ebberston Hall near Scarborough: sprightly and miles away from Office of Works Georgian, RAF Neo-Georgian, War Office Georgian.Perhaps the Architecture of the Modern Age had already arrived. It was there for all to see in the Germany of the Weimar republic: glass and ...”

“... Horden colliery closed in 1986, though the union committee meets every Wednesday in the Miners’ Hall to process death benefit and compensation claims. The Big Club, Horden’s ‘legendary workingmen’s club’, turns out to be virtually shut up, save for a doorman levying a toll of tenpence a time to deter non-existent visitors, and a dwindling band of ...”

“... cancer that were diagnosed a few years after he quit. One of Beckett’s best discoveries is Dr Richard Stone, whose father, Joe Stone, had been Wilson’s GP since the 1940s – a job that the junior Stone took over for the last 12 years of Wilson’s life. ‘Harold had been the master of the detail, and then he didn’t have the detail,’ ...”

“... had the kind of peacefulness that ancientness alone can bestow – the young men walked the hall knowing the world they walked in possessed the texture of meditation and martyrdom, of prayers uttered and strong beliefs confirmed. Yet round the corner in the Campo de’ Fiori, the statue of Giordano Bruno stands high above a modern centre of bar ...”

“... the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit about House of Lords reform. As I sit quietly in the entrance hall, there suddenly irrupt, stride past, and disappear through the front door Major Ashdown and his little platoon of MPs – shoulders squared, eyes front, chins thrust forward, as if on their way to a Royal Marine assault course. Next appears Robin Cook, who ...”

“... to become governing rhetoric.At the office one morning at the end of August, I was approached by Richard Johnson, the editor of the New York Post’s gossip column, Page Six. Every day, a photocopied packet of the gossip columns from the national and local papers was prepared by the interns at George. This was one way to keep up with public versions of ...”

“... we drifted away from the stage I saw something else. I glanced sideways into a room off the main hall, and saw that it was full of stacking chairs. It was a depressing, institutional, impersonal sight. I thought, Charles must see this all the time. Glance sideways, into the wings, and you see the tacky preparations for the triumphant public event. You see ...”