“... It’s hard to imagine the chair of the BBC board arranging an £800,000 loan for Starmer, as Richard Sharp did for Johnson. But speaking to people within Labour you get the sense that the party often doesn’t recognise the tension between private interests and public office, especially when those involved are what one person described as ‘members of ...”

“... around in a very characteristic way, and blurted out his answer in a fast, high-pitched voice. ‘Richard,’ he said, ‘I think I see exactly what you mean, and it’s fascinating, but really I don’t see why "suburban". Aren’t you trying to be too – specific? I don’t see why suburban has anything to do with it. I really don’t think it has.’ At ...”

“... is a good Frost to have and keep in the canon. Nothing can replace ‘Birches’ and ‘Mending Wall’ and ‘The Hill Wife’ and the late, brokenhearted ‘Directive’. But even in his wearier books, when Frost was too often able to summon only a thought and a form – instead of his magical combination of a feeling, a thought and a form – there are ...”

“... to Joy’ with hand movements as slight as those of someone adjusting a picture hanging on the wall. Richard Strauss excoriated conductors who used their left hand at all and the rare video footage of him conducting his own work in his final years suggests that he did most of the heavy lifting with his eyes. Boulez ...”

“... knowing that if one person walked into me I was finished … I crept along, clinging to the wall, emaciated, etiolated, wrapped up in jackets and scarves and hat and feeling very conspicuously a PWA.’ At the end, he was almost totally blind: ‘I can hear the splash and swish of car tyres on wet tarmac outside my window and I can hear rain rapping ...”

“... off and opened [her] purse, and took a pistol out, saw a stack of Marilyns leaning against the wall, shot it right between the eyes in the forehead, and then put the gun away and put her gloves back on and left’.Among those who joined the circle was Edie Sedgwick, who became Warhol’s inseparable companion for social outings. Having come into a ...”

“... a poet be a novelist? Why not?’ Then, in late 1962, after she’d torn the phoneline out of the wall during an argument with her husband, Ted Hughes, and he had left her and their two infant children in Devon, there were only letters. ‘I am fine,’ she wrote to her mother in America. ‘Just need a settled nanny & to rest & write & letters. I love & live ...”

“... To kill!             There was The child batting her head against the wall, Beating back and forth like a gaffed fish. There was the wife who suspected they were nothing. There’s the head face-up in the glabrous slop. The suspicion that one is nothing appears throughout Seidel’s work, the consequence of political horror. ‘I ...”

“... to bin their Guevara posters. Marxism was already in dire straits some years before the Berlin Wall came down. One reason given was that the traditional agent of Marxist revolution, the working class, had been wiped out by changes to the capitalist system – or at least was no longer in a majority. It is true that the industrial proletariat had ...”

“... battery sets nevertheless remained in demand even when most people had mains electricity, because wall points were sparely provided, often only one per house. Mains sets were heavily promoted by the industry but only became generally affordable with the Philco of 1935, which cost just over £5 and was billed as the People’s Set – and here I must raise a ...”

“... making a number of smoothly-meshing points around central images – crusade, change, the future. Richard Nixon, for his part, was apt to jump from dignity to folksiness, as if the strain of keeping up a high tone was too much. The most deviant of the post-war acceptance speeches was Harry Truman’s in 1948. Today, if you read the speech rather than ...”

“... most appealing – so she takes it to the menders. In Like, Kate sees a row of watches hung on the wall under the sink in her mother’s old room: ‘There are five altogether and they have their hands stopped at different times.’ Time can stop, or it can move unexpectedly fast. Lise, a receptionist at the Global, watches the minutes click by on the digital ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... architects to collaborate was impressive, especially in the case of the ‘Dream Team’ of Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and Steven Holl. On the other hand, to be in the running one had to be a designated über-architect, presumably with the technical expertise required of grands projets: stock in the Dream Team, Lord Foster and the ...”

“... been fucking with a Stalinist,” hissed a man in Hornsey, pinning me against the wall at a party.’ Was this the beginning of the Women’s Movement? Rowbotham began to get involved in a Women’s Liberation consciousness-raising group. ‘I was convinced that women could make a unique contribution to radical thinking about ...”