“... themselves, or to priests or nurses, while the heroic surgeon sawed on. Half a century ago, John Alfred Ryle, the founder of social medicine, declared that one of the mistakes of scientific medicine was to have shelved the problem of pain. With both clinical and humane ends in mind, he called for fresh study. Since then things have indeed improved, but ...”

“... affected to some degree, and looked for an explanation. ‘She called out to the country,’ Elton John sang at the funeral. But may it not have been the English Rose’s country which, in the aftermath of loss, ceased being able to call out in a traditional way? If so, a call long responded to – not really ‘down the ages’ but for quite a long ...”

“... go wrong,’ he said by way of explanation to the equally adamant Menuhin. Gould gave way but it took a fair amount of time to persuade him to cede ‘control’ to someone else. He did the same kind of thing with the pieces and composers he played: only he knew what he was going to play, how it would sound, how fast (or slow) it would be taken. He ...”

“... oiks, like Peter Wright (Bishop’s Stortford High School) and, more recently, David Shayler (John Hampden Grammar, High Wycombe). The latest, Richard Tomlinson, doesn’t quite fit – he got a scholarship from a state primary school to a ‘prestigious public school’. The motives for whistleblowing can be various: high principle, personal ...”

“... boat. This time, however, it was not the thought of pretty girls that diverted him but his friend John Evelyn’s ‘pretty’ new book ‘against Solitude’. Evelyn’s Publick employment and an active life prefer’d to solitude, published in 1667, was written to refute Sir George Mackenzie’s 1665 work, A Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude to Public ...”

“... and writers and tourists of the Civil War, Gellhorn and Hemingway began sleeping together; she took his condescension and misogyny for ‘the foibles of genius’. Madrid under Fascist shelling seems to have been one long party for foreign correspondents. ‘The Fascists had the better gramophone and played a song called "Kitten on the Keys” again and ...”

“... not vested interests, which are dangerous for good and evil. The author of this passage was John Maynard Keynes. His words were not carelessly uttered but form the pregnant last paragraph of his magnum opus, The General Theory, published in 1936. This obviously expressed his hope that his own ideas would be disseminated through such a process and in ...”

“... all of which ended in failure. First, there was the Flint Voice, a local alternative rag which took on such subjects as police brutality and the looming presence of General Motors. In 1983, this morphed into the Michigan Voice, where Moore met his wife, Kathleen Glynn, who has produced all his films. Next came his disastrous editorship of Mother Jones, the ...”

“... abandoned hotels and nightclubs, deserted runways and flooded rivers.’ After the war, Ballard took a boat to Southampton with his mother and younger sister. In 1947, Edna and Margaret rejoined Ballard’s father in Shanghai, while he remained in England, boarding at The Leys School in Cambridge and spending the holidays with his maternal grandparents in ...”

“... of the despised ‘intelligentsia’. Being unillusioned was his speciality, and in public he took a nicely self-deprecating line. ‘There are but two important critics in my own country who have troubled to take me seriously,’ he writes in The Summing Up (1938), ‘and when clever young men write essays about contemporary fiction they never think of ...”

“... anyone vote for Barack Obama? Not why would anyone want to see Obama elected president rather than John McCain (or Hillary Clinton for that matter), but why would anyone who desired that outcome think that his or her individual vote could make the slightest difference in helping to bring it about? General elections are never decided by a single vote, so no ...”

“... very different from each other, culminating in two formidably sophisticated pieces of work: John Kerrigan’s New Penguin edition (1986) and Colin Burrow’s Oxford one (2002). Their long, informative and illuminating introductions might be expected to have solved all possible problems. But the difficulties of the Sonnets are of a kind that enmeshes ...”

“... chemical munitions’ three days before the attack. In an aggressive speech later that day, John Kerry provided more details. He said that Syria’s ‘chemical weapons personnel were on the ground, in the area, making preparations’ by 18 August. ‘We know that the Syrian regime elements were told to prepare for the attack by putting on gas masks and ...”

“... is the century: ‘I am one hundred years old. I can read. I went to the mission school.’ She took care of the bear before Lou came and she’ll take care of him again when Lou is gone. Shit with the bear every morning and he’ll like you, Lucy says. And Lou thinks, why not? Set two smells next to each other like twin beds. Now, if my happiness came down ...”

“... information by physically and psychologically abusing their prisoners: ‘each hit the CIA took for its detention-and-interrogation programme pushed CIA leaders further to one side of a morbid calculation that the agency would be far better off killing, rather than jailing, terror suspects.’ According to ...”