“... a series of brief, knockabout, allegedly comic exchanges with Plomley, the actor manqué, as the straight man – a role he clearly enjoyed:Plomley (reads): ‘Vic Oliver – comedian, lightning club manipulator, violinist and comedy trick cyclist. Light work done with a horse and van.’ Is this a photograph of you?Oliver: Don’t you think it’s like ...”

“... her parentage at her baptism 11 years after her mother’s death, and the parish register for St Michael, Queenhithe, in the City of London, records: ‘Laura daughter of William Jerdan and Letitia Elizabeth Landon’. Asked for her father’s profession or rank, Laura appears to have been unsure what to say. The beginnings of ‘Manufacturer’ and ...”

“... transparent, had arrived at a point where most of their activity was secret and mysterious. Enter Michael Lewis. Flash Boys is a number of things, one of the most important being an exposition of exactly what is going on in the stock market; it’s a one-stop shop for an explanation of high-frequency trading (hereafter, HFT). The book reads like a ...”

“... book of adaptations and translations from European poetry called Imitations. In it, Lowell steps straight into the perennial themes of classical and modern poetry, desire, loss, mortality, eheu fugaces, war. He is Achilles’ blood-lust, Sappho’s pining, the tributes of Mallarmé to Gautier, and Pasternak to Akhmatova. At the same time, poetry becomes ...”

“... memory, like a motto, or an old tune. My slightly frivolous title, ‘What Henry Knew’, takes us straight to Henry James, of course, and the (feeble) joke is meant, among other things, to indicate that I recognise how obvious a move this is, once we have started on the question of literature and knowledge. It was James who wrote so eloquently, in relation to ...”

“... or elegant.‘For many gay men, fucking satisfies a constellation of needs that are dealt with in straight society outside the arena of sex,’ Richard Goldstein argued in the Village Voice in 1983. ‘For gay men, sex, that most powerful implement of attachment and arousal, is also an agent of communion, replacing an often hostile family and even shaping ...”

“... it was a paper ‘written by Central European Jews for Central African blacks’ would have flown straight over my head. I didn’t know that it had championed the decolonisation of Africa or opposed the Suez invasion in a famous editorial that described Britain and France as gangsters. What I remember were the things that made us laugh: the column by Paul ...”

“... a lecturer’s spoken words (perhaps with the aid of automatic captioning) and copied large chunks straight into their essay.From the perspective of students raised in a digital culture, the anti-plagiarism taboo no doubt seems to be just one more academic hang-up, a weird injunction to take perfectly adequate information, break it into pieces and refashion ...”

“... ministers, amongst whom Brown challenged the Education Minister directly.     Brown: I want a straight answer to a straight question. If you had to choose between these 400,000 15-year-olds and university students, which would you help?     Gordon-Walker: If I had to make such a choice I suppose I’d help ...”

“... of these themes, without actually expanding them very much. Yet here we have Burke presented as a straight, unambiguous Tory; either the adamant foe of Jefferson or the moaning defender of Marie Antoinette. This is a real and sad declension. One of the signal achievements of the French Revolution was the abolition of slavery, and one of the horrors of ...”

“... an oik, show proper deference to seniors and get a decent tailor.This dispatch, which appears in Michael Yardley and Dennis Sewell’s 1989 book A New Model Army, sounds like a transmission from another era. But the practice of moulding the intake has continued. Patrick Hennessey, the author of The Junior Officers’ Reading Club, served from 2004 to ...”

“... he had also reverted to the middle ground of his practice, landscape painted straight from the motif. Landscape punctuated with near equivalents to figures – the sun, the stars, the trees. At its furthest reach, pervaded with them, so that the familiar biblical metaphor swished both ways and all grass was flesh. Investing vegetation ...”

“... by the head of serials, Jonathan Powell, produced by the Birmingham regional drama head, Michael Wearing, and scheduled before Martin had finished the scripts. Third, as a result of its plural structure, the department had gained and kept its reputation as a producer-led, oppositional space, not just for Edge of Darkness, but for Alan Bleasdale’s ...”

“... treatment of persons. Among its heroes are Isaiah Berlin and, with a good deal of qualification, Michael Oakeshott; on the Left there is the author’s contemporary Eric Hobsbawm. Others’ heroes – Raymond Williams, for instance – are sometimes harshly dismissed (‘a nonconformist spellbinder, rhetorical, evasive and vacuous’). These judgments are ...”

“... city, Manchester was notoriously overcrowded, jerrybuilt and grey. The ‘poor quality of straight life’, as Haslam drily puts it, gave a ‘mania’ to the population’s efforts at escape. Drinking was already a notorious local pastime – the beer was safer than the water – but the sheer density and novelty of the 19th-century city generated ...”