“... two reasons. First, the Contract was the most completely poll-driven manifesto in modern history. Frank Luntz, the Republican Party’s opinion-meister, ran questions by focus-groups and other poll-fodder until he found topics (like lower taxation) which rang a bell. If the bell rang, the plank went into the platform. If not, not. Most people don’t want a ...”

“... psychology and the backchat of a paperhanger’. Sticking to his guns, he became (in the words of Frank O’Connor) ‘the greatest of all English storytellers’.Times change. Mention Coppard today and you’ll be met with blank looks. Until recently I knew him only by name, one I associated with a brand of gently nostalgic, middlebrow English writers who ...”

“... Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind his shoulder, Alun Lewis of Edward Thomas. But the idea of modern warfare as one thing and of poetic response to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness. Back then, although we loved the old rogue for the rodomontade and sheer cheek of his rhetoric, we got rid of ...”

“... his subject. As a boy Wallace started out reading Hardy Boys mysteries and science fiction like Frank Herbert’s Dune; by the age of 11 he was mowing a neighbour’s lawn in exchange for a tutorial on Stendhal. It was around this time that his parents gave him his own television set. He watched everything: sitcoms, game shows, Star Trek, soap operas. Among ...”

“... at the Guggenheim. Designed by the Post-Modern artist Robert Wilson, who has draped the Frank Lloyd Wright spiral ramps with white gauze, bathed the museum in patchouli and musk, and created a Japanese soundtrack to accompany the show, the exhibition is a perfect example of the blend of fashion, art, commerce and academic analysis that marks the ...”

“... sliced-thin sentences leaving a trail of stitches – maximalists like Moody follow the lead of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo by wiring themselves into consumer culture, conspiracy theory, pop iconography and spy-craft technology, trying to chart an underlying pattern in the chaos, a treasure map of paranoia. Purple America, Moody’s major-statement novel ...”

“... to emulate his perfect humanity. This blend of scepticism and devotion caused Emerson’s friend Thomas Carlyle to dismiss Unitarians as ‘halfway house characters’ who deserve the ‘bat fate: to be killed among the rats as a bird, among the birds as a rat’.Emerson nested comfortably among the bats at first. He became minister of Boston’s historic ...”

“... Did the German physicists make no atomic bombs during the Second World War because they wouldn’t or because they couldn’t? This is the question which Powers addresses in his extensive study of German atomic research: a question finally answered by the recent publication of the secretly recorded conversations between Heisenberg and the other German atomic physicists interned at Farm Hall, near Huntingdon, in the summer of 1945 ...”

“... succeeded him, Ken Livingstone. ‘A gimmick’. A megalomaniac right-wing fantasy. By 2008, in a frank admission during the run-up to the mayoral election, Livingstone boasted that he had feigned enthusiasm for the 2012 Olympics as a way of generating funds for brownfield development in East London and Thames Gateway, seeding his favoured pylon-forest ...”

“... in my uncertainty. Go down to the National Gallery for a meeting of the trustees, where Keith Thomas tells me that his polling booth in Oxford is next door to a pub in Merton Street and that, it being May morning, he had to fight his way in through crowds of drunken revellers, an ordeal he feels might deter tamer spirits. As a historian he speculates ...”

“... a Christian after all) but that of the rest of the cast. 7 April. The open mouth of Chelsea’s Frank Lampard, having scored a goal, is also the howl on the face of the damned man in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. 16 April. The row over Lord Ashcroft’s non-dom status seems to have died down. Nobody, I think, noted that it was the reverse of the row that ...”

“... even Hemingway’s white-boned prose acquired loose flaps. Two years later, still stricken with Thomas Wolfe elephantiasis, Styron sends haunted dispatches from the asphalt jungle. ‘New York is vast, hideous and strewn with the wrecks of lost and fidgeting souls.’ Unlike so many others of his word-besotted WWII-vet generation, he would retain this Old ...”

“... media as ‘the Congo Crisis’ – were funded by Belgian and American business interests. As Thomas Kanza explained a decade later in Conflict in the Congo (1972), the separatists ‘were dependent, ideologically and financially, on the mining companies. Their political motives were dictated by the Europeans who made common cause with them.’ The mining ...”

“... East Coast filmmakers hurried West to seek maximum sunlight and maximum separation from Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company, which demanded copyright payment or else a bullet in the expensive newfangled movie cameras. The canyons and ravines of the Hollywood Hills were the natural redoubts against the Patents Company ...”

“... was a home student at Somerville. In 1882, she got a first-class degree in English, the first of Thomas Arnold’s female grandchildren so to distinguish herself.At Oxford she met another offspring of a famous dynasty, T.H. Huxley’s son, Leonard. The young man had been a brilliant undergraduate. Should he marry, he would forfeit a career in law, politics ...”