“... Dick, has been landed with his opprobrious nickname because of a regrettable accident which took place in his childhood: the nickname celebrates ironically the fact that he shot a pregnant woman dead, with a shot discharged at random out of the cupola of the family home. But it is the very guilt which attaches to this random and intrinsically absurd ...”

“... Allowed to read this work, Juliette, who had come on a bit, suggested it should be retitled ‘John Thomas and Lady Jane’, an idea which Lawrence liked but his publishers resisted. Trouble began when Julian on a voyage to Africa met a pretty American girl in the ever-fatal Red Sea. It was to be no passing fancy and he demanded that his wife should rise ...”

“... to the Arabs because such a compromise would lead to Israel’s death; the second attacked John le Carré for suggesting that Israel might have over-reacted (‘It is as if we British had lost our temper with the IRA,’ le Carré had written in the previous week’s Observer, ‘and decided to punish the entire Irish people once and for all’); and ...”

“... even by their own definition of Jewishness’. The Nazi definition of a Jew admitted of degree, it took stock of paternity, and it more or less discounted religion. And another difficulty, which is inflammatory, is how to hold in balance, on the one hand, that for which so many died and, on the other hand, that for which others claim a novel citizenship, while ...”

“... to metabolise the cargo of steroids, hormones, tissue-boosters and flavour-enhancers that you took aboard with your lunch. In terms of drug-ingestion, the only difference between taking afternoon tea and going on a crack-binge is one of degree – degree of chemical potency, degree of personal commitment, degree of acceptable damage. The many formulations ...”

“... to be small, ugly, ignorant and coarse. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge had known her before she met John Hatfield, a bigamist who tricked her into a fraudulent marriage, and both men were united in their venomous hatred of her seducer. Yet Hatfield, whose exploits eventually brought him to the gallows, was, as Bragg shows, one of the popular heroes of the ...”

“... about Dianetics was that ‘the author seems honestly to believe what he has written.’ Hubbard took the rejection badly. When his followers were arrested for practising medicine without a licence, he complained that the United States made it ‘illegal to heal or cure anything’. He began to reconsider the distinction he’d made between psychology and ...”

“... was then that the ideas of the artist as great original and the artwork as absolutely unique first took hold. Yet it is precisely this ‘authorial’ notion of the artist and this ‘performative’ model of the work (that is, as ‘the product of a singular historical performance’) that Nagel and Wood want to put into question. ‘Since the late 15th ...”

“... family gone to the dogs, he failed at school, went into the navy, and then, not so rebelliously, took various jobs in the theatre provided for him by the father of a friend. He married two difficult women who drank and enjoyed their public fights until he didn’t any more, and then the most interesting thing happened to him: at 44 he met the 19-year-old ...”

“... Britain in the era of anti-Fascism. Broda’s protagonists do not belong in the shadowy world of John le Carré’s intelligence professionals or agents, or even the milieu of full-time Communist Party or Comintern functionaries, let alone the Party cadres trained into total identification with Moscow in institutions like the Lenin School. Their life was ...”

“... unlike today’s – held that capitalism would eventually produce economic and social equality. John Stuart Mill, one of its champions, declared that if it didn’t, he would become a socialist.) Macaulay’s History of England now reads obviously as a document of its time; which is the way it is usually treated, if it’s included, in history courses. As ...”

“... what he’s set in motion. ‘As a fiction writer,’ he said in a 1978 debate with the novelist John Gardner, ‘you hope that the amount of meaning that you can pack into the book will always be more than you are capable of consciously understanding. Otherwise, the book is likely to be as thin as you are. You have to trick your medium into doing far better ...”

“... to clear. Operation Yellowhammer, the no-deal contingency plan commissioned after Boris Johnson took office, assumed waiting times as long as two and a half days as a result of new documentation requirements for which the majority of HGV operators would be unprepared. Even tiny additional processing delays would cause a significant knock-on effect. They ...”

“... hell itself, filled with writhing beasts that rend at one another as fires destroy the earth. In John Martin’s The Country of The Iguanodon (1837), a group of dragon-like reptiles slither and bite; in A. Demarly’s apocalyptic Eruptions of Poisonous Hot Springs in the Triassic Period (1883) a geyser of toxic gas spurts from a volcanic vent, while dead ...”

“... in 1791, allowing US citizens access to arms, was manageable when most firearms were muskets that took minutes to load. Obviously, this is no longer the case. So while it may be tempting to attribute current political dysfunction in the US to particular personalities, some of the root causes are long-term, structural and connected to America’s experience of ...”