“... ending in time to run it off on Thursday morning. This is the world Wenger inherited when he took over as Arsenal manager. After the announcement in August 1996, the headline on the back page of the Daily Mirror ran: ‘Arsène Who?’ In his new autobiography, Wenger describes his first match as manager: ‘On 12 October 1996, I was no longer in the ...”

“... to misunderstand its intentions. They knew how dangerous a weapon the U-boat had proved to be, and took it for granted that Germany would use it again. The Admiralty worked hard on anti-submarine weapons and tactics, and prepared to build a large class of anti-submarine vessels called ‘corvettes’. But there was a puzzling discrepancy between what they ...”

“... of the Falkland Islands by Argentina in 1982, they found that the relevant file was missing. It took 12 years for the advice given by the Foreign Office’s legal adviser Sir Gerald Fitzmaurice to the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax on the day of the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939 to surface:The Secretary of State’s enquiry about how ...”

“... were watching and the books they were reading. Lera: Françoise Sagan, Iris Murdoch, Susan Hill, John Updike (‘pointless’), Evelyn Waugh (‘black and unreadable’), Yuri Trifonov, the Kyrgyz author Chinghiz Aitmatov, books on yoga. Harold: mostly 19th-century classics, but also ‘one modern book a week’. The families exchanged presents: from England ...”

“... joke with her,’ O’Hagan said, ‘that she would one day be President of a new Ireland.’ She took down some of the photographs and showed them to me. I noted the smiles and the drinks and the look of songs being sung. ‘I really enjoyed Rosemary’s company,’ Ms O’Hagan said. 12. Raymond, my Unionist, wouldn’t come to the phone. I rang him from ...”

“... Algren and, as if taking revenge on Partisan Review she called him when she got to Chicago. Algren took her through the Polish neighbourhood, where he lived ‘alongside an alley full of steaming trash cans and flapping newspapers’, as she later wrote, in a two-room apartment without a bath. He introduced her to skid-row bars and the black ghetto. He brought ...”

“... doubted. In the Thomas household there was never an end to worrying about money – ‘the family took it for granted that my father had to worry about his income at the end of every month’ – for few of Dr Thomas’s patients paid promptly and many not at all, though ‘some sent in small cheques, once every few months.’ Thus the domestic economy of the ...”

“... that Roosevelt had had a change of heart. French expatriates in Washington, notably the poet Saint-John Perse, talked down De Gaulle; Washington’s envoy to Vichy, Robert Murphy, briefed hard against him; but perhaps the president drew his own conclusions from the disastrous Anglo-French assault on Dakar in the autumn of 1940, undertaken at De Gaulle’s ...”

“... go water-skiing. I wasn’t struck down again in the same way until May 1980 when I inadvertently took an aspirin. I remember looking in the glass and thinking that my face seemed to be acquiring an interesting artistic pallor, when I suddenly passed out, the aspirin having made my stomach bleed. That, too, was around my birthday, but in the intervening years ...”

“... British Antarctic Survey: they were expected to drink beer in the hall, while the officer class took cocktails in the drawing-room. The men preferred beer, we were told, and, given the choice, they might well have chosen ‘cloudy’, the connoisseur’s drop, before the filtered blandness of the more expensive ‘bright’ ale; a cask of cloudy ...”

“... divide, if only just. Mozart’s last symphonies placed high demands on his players and took the music out of the reach of the talented amateurs who not infrequently joined professional bands in public performances at that time (the leading English amateur violinist and composer, John Marsh, complained in his ...”

“... be equally true of its paraphrasable content.’ Taking issue with a recent editor of the Sonnets, John Kerrigan, she points to his lack of interest in the linguistic variation in sonnet 129, and says he takes ‘a single-minded expository view of the poem, as though it were a self-consistent sermon’. For Vendler, the verbal imagination’s true intent is ...”

“... and teachers. Not since the publication of the central texts of the modern history of slavery, John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom in 1947 and Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution in 1956, has any serious history book claimed that slavery was a benign paternalistic institution. No one has argued that it was anything other than the great ...”

“... In 1993 John McGahern wrote an essay called ‘The Church and Its Spire’, in which he considered his own relationship to the Catholic Church. He made no mention of the fact that he had, in the mid-1960s, been fired from his job as a teacher on the instructions of the Catholic archbishop of Dublin because he had written a novel banned by the Irish Censorship Board (The Dark), and because he had been married in a register office ...”

“... have known about that,’ and she might add, ‘Or could you?’ and these coincidences she then took, and expected me to take, as more interesting than what I had asked her. Certainly she never gave me the information I asked for. But she never answered any question that I put to her. She did not like it if one person talked to another. From time to time my ...”