“... this is a flower which is not much to look at, the whole point of which is its scent, this must be considered a triumph of marketing. 24 January. Somebody writes from the New Statesman asking me to contribute to a feature on Englishness, the other contributors, the letter says, ‘ranging from Frank Bruno to Calvin [sic] MacKenzie’. I wish, as they ...”

“... up to then that there were short poems in the 16th century. I knew there were sonnets and plays by Shakespeare and The Faerie Queen, but even saying the phrase now – ‘short poem in the 16th century’ – makes me wish I were writing about the work of Fulke Greville or Sir Walter Ralegh or Sir Thomas Wyatt. I studied English and History. In English we ...”

“... what it says right now in the window of my local bookshop. It’s been painted on the glass by hand. It’s from the first sentence of Mason & Dixon.Thomas Pynchon was born on Long Island, New York in 1937. He studied engineering, physics and, later, English literature, at Cornell University, then worked as a technical writer for Boeing until 1962. Not ...”

“... to caress simultaneously both halves of the monarchy.’ This level of magical abstraction can be found in all of Roth’s novels, from the earliest, The Spider’s Web (1923), to his last published work, The String of Pearls (which was published in 1939, but probably written in 1936-37). The Spider’s Web is a generally rather crude and flat book, but ...”

“... and analysts packed into the ballroom are paying only partial attention to the presentation by the Enron Corporation. On the New York Stock Exchange, Enron’s shares have been rising all day, by as much as $2 an hour. It is now mid-afternoon, New York is about to close, and the members of the audience know that the ...”

“... battle experience in Vietnam, a PhD in economics from Harvard, and a defence intellectual employed by the Rand Corporation of Santa Monica, with the highest security clearances, Ellsberg is as good as the American system can produce in the way of a male citizen working in the foreign policy apparatus. His odyssey from Pentagon staff officer to the man who ...”

“... package proposed that non-British students who possess skills which are in short supply should be able to move easily from completing their degrees to finding employment. Aimed primarily at Asia and Central/Eastern Europe, the scheme was commended by David Blunkett as proof that the Government was ‘delivering ...”

“... and skirts a central event that is not fully unveiled until the novel’s end: this turns out to be a baroquely paradisal reunion between Lev and Zoya, which takes place – in 1956, with the camp rules now relaxed – in a small wooden hut known as the House of Meetings. On the windowsill the narrator notices something peculiar, ‘much ...”

“... men who dress, as Woodward does, in dark suits, plain ties and light blue shirts, the better to be observed on TV – they never reveal much of themselves.What is known about Woodward? He’s a former navy man, who wrote several hundred articles on Watergate for the Washington Post with his colleague Carl Bernstein. The two then wrote famous books about the ...”

“... have had an edge to it when Lennon performed it at a benefit for the relatives of inmates killed by police after the Attica State Prison riot in 1971 and it was BBC policy, nearly twenty years later, to keep it off the air for the duration of the Gulf War. For the rest, the John Lennon story is a tortuous family affair, in many intersecting senses of the ...”

“... people, one making the comment and the other perceiving it: and both were amazed, although not by the same thing. One of these persons behaved as though . . . he was obliged to believe in something the reality of which had until then seemed uncertain to him . . . But the other person was rightly surprised, because he had not known that the real ...”

“... an outpost of Birmingham University, but in its heyday it was home to a writer with some claims to be the most widely read, in English and in translation, across the world. Visitors already knew so much because Marie Corelli not only boasted the longest entry in Who’s Who, but had enjoyed commercial success and international celebrity on a scale ...”

“... of the Economic Community in Brussels. But he was not a typical French mandarin. He was Russian by birth and went on to study philosophy and religion in Germany in the 1920s, without bothering to take a degree. He then moved to Paris, but never attended a French university, let alone one of the grandes écoles, and he was already in his forties when he ...”

“... and then to the several selected volumes that Heaney went on to publish. ‘Where else could it be placed?’ Heaney asked Dennis O’Driscoll, his Boswell. The contrast between the two signature poems is striking. Heaney finds in the spectacle of his father digging a model for his own poetic enterprise: he is obliged to use his pen where ‘the old ...”

“... des Sciences in Paris that Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre had permanently fixed images created by light. Daguerre was a showman: his painted dioramas had long been popular in Paris. Now he named this branch of a new art after himself. The daguerreotype was the result not only of scientific exploration and personal marketing skills but of canny negotiations ...”