“... 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 ...”

“... For revolutionary intellectuals in the Third World, Sartre seemed miraculously uncontaminated by the paternalism – and hypocrisy – that gave the white left such a bad reputation. While intellectuals in the orbit of the French Communist Party were vacillating over the Algerian war of independence, he gave his unconditional support to the rebels, a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Tyvek and Kevlar. It made the powder that fired the bullets and it perfected the bullet-proof vest.By the 1970s the DuPont family’s hold on Delaware was total. ‘General Motors could buy Delaware if DuPont were willing to sell it,’ Ralph Nader said. As Tim Murphy wrote last year in Mother Jones, ‘the state’s centre of gravity began to shift from the ...”

“... crisis. The political debate has coalesced around two proposed solutions. The first, advocated by the ‘Drill, baby, drill’ contingent, favours fast-tracking new oil and gas licences and reducing taxes on fossil fuel companies. Its proponents point to the Norwegian energy system as a model, but don’t suggest setting up a majority state-owned company ...”

“... works of art, Adorno maintained in Minima Moralia, are inevitably at once refused and demanded by them. That they may simply be incongruous he disregarded. Cases where parallels are as close as those between Proust and Powell lend ‘the compulsion to evaluate’ he thought so generally inescapable a particular ...”

“... On 28 November 1988, Paul Ingram, a police officer, was arrested by colleagues in his office in Olympia, Washington State. His daughters, Ericka and Julie, had accused him of sexual molestation. Ingram made no attempt to deny the charges. He couldn’t remember doing anything, but he said: ‘My girls know me. They wouldn’t lie about something like this ...”

“... so in the shadow of the Holocaust. Annual numbers of executions declined steadily after 1945 and by the early 1960s were barely a fifth of what they had been before the war. In 1965 – the year Britain abolished the death penalty – there were seven, compared, for example, to almost two hundred a year during the 1930s. There were two in 1966; one the year ...”

“... last while I have carried my heart in my boots. For a minute or two I actually imagined I could be responsible for the spread of foot and mouth disease across Britain. On my first acquaintance with the hill farmers of the Lake District, on a plot high above Keswick, I had a view of the countryside for tens of miles. I thought of the fields that had passed ...”

“... parades and pompom-wielding cheerleaders failed to greet the news that the UK economy grew by 0.1 per cent in the quarter-year to December. That’s as it should be, because this is as fragile as a recovery can possibly be, after six quarters of economic contraction. This is ...”

“... Head (1967), to only moderate acclaim. (None of them has been reprinted.) ‘It’ was going to be a novel dealing with the Irish War of Independence of 1919-21, which his Irish Protestant mother had childhood memories of, and which he was reading up on in a public library on 53rd Street, ‘scarcely adding to my feeble conception of how the thing should ...”

“... sales and advertising. Both of these have for years been under severe pressure. The story told by circulation figures is so obvious that it’s difficult to find anything interesting to point out about it. A recent OECD report, The Evolution of News and the Internet, makes the picture clear.* Between 2004 and 2009, the US newspaper industry lost 34 per ...”