“... The present judicial spectrum ranges from moderate liberals to radical rightists, and Bush will be aiming to nominate candidates who will push the court’s centre of gravity further to the right. There are two very different kinds of conservative. The worldly statesman, distrustful of large visions and focused on the prudent management of concrete problems ...”

“... of 3 May 1591, that the English alchemist, clairvoyant and con-man Edward Kelley was arrested by officers of Emperor Rudolf II. At the time of his arrest Kelley was an internationally famous figure, but thereafter the story grows confused: he disappears from view into the dungeons of 16th-century Bohemia. News of his death reached England in late ...”

“... Brick Lane used to be the home of the dead. For centuries it was part of a Roman burial ground, an unclean extremity lying beyond the walls of the City of London. In 1603, a quarter of a century after bricks began to be manufactured here, John Stow described its buildings as ‘filthy cottages ...”

“... and in recent years it has been hard to find in paperback (Bate’s useful selection won’t be published in this country until his biography appears in paperback). One result of this neglect is that the circumstances of his life are not widely known. Clare’s paternal grandmother, Alice Clare, was the daughter of the senior parish clerk at Helpston in ...”

“... purple goose-pimpled legs of English women in miniskirts. She wrote about air raids and Ragnarök; by the end of the Frederica quartet – The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, written and published across a quarter of a century – it is clear she has entered into erotic conjugation with a Norseman. She won the Booker Prize ...”

“... I was waiting at the airport. An announcement echoed across the departure gate: there was going to be a delay. I hadn’t looked at the book in front of me in more than thirty years – Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago, his two convention pieces from 1968 – and just as my phone began to buzz my eye landed on a sentence: ‘The reporter was a ...”

“... Like Jesus, Streisand exists mostly as the subject of other people’s stories; she has refused to be interviewed for any of the biographies written about her. In this book, which she claims she has been meaning to write ever since Jackie Onassis suggested it in 1984, she wants to set the record straight about ‘the diva myth that has followed me all my ...”

“... a pool of water in a blue dress. Another was of Hania, aged two, rolling down a hill of daisies by Ladbroke Grove.In the 15th century, ‘tower’ was another way of naming heaven. But Rania always felt Grenfell Tower was too tall. They were at the top and you could see the Hammersmith and City trains coming in and out of Latimer Road Station. From some of ...”

“... a case of believing is seeing, rather than the other way around.His faith was sometimes tested by discrepancies between the map and the territory, though it wasn’t clear to me whether he believed the ground or the map to be at fault (that it might be the map-reader never entered the ...”

“... the president looked wildly about for his minister of culture. But she was being addressed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘Jean Genet,’ said the Queen again, helpfully, ‘Vous le connaissez?’ ‘Bien sûr,’ said the president. ‘Il m’intéresse,’ said the Queen. ‘Vraiment?’ The president put down his spoon. It was going to ...”

“... the old-fashioned spirit of political economy. The story of modern economic thought can after all be told as the shift from political economy, as its practitioners thought of it, to the discipline now simply called economics. With the ‘marginal revolution’ of the 1870s (named for Jevons’s theory of ‘marginal utility’), economics acquired a true ...”

“... City estate in northern Berlin, one of a cluster of social housing projects from the Weimar era to be given a Unesco World Heritage listing. It is a commonplace that modern architecture in Britain, as an ideology, was an import from interwar Central Europe – dropped off en route to the US by Mendelsohn or Gropius, and ...”

“... I wasn’t expecting – what I don’t think anyone was expecting – was that ten years would go by quite so fast. At the start of 2008, Gordon Brown was prime minister of the United Kingdom, George W. Bush was president of the United States, and only politics wonks had ever heard of the junior senator from Illinois; Nicolas Sarkozy was president of ...”

“... caution, bipartisan to a fault, should have provoked such ferocious white resistance – fanned by the man who questioned the validity of his birth certificate and then succeeded him as president. This most eloquent champion of ‘post-racialism’ may have been the most powerful man in the world, yet he remained a prisoner of his race, of his ‘black ...”

“... as the international observers from the Carter Center declared. And a failed referendum would be even worse than no referendum at all: it would open the door to all of Khartoum’s objections, and lead straight to another civil war. But the autonomous government of South Sudan refused to make any concessions: ‘The date [of the referendum] is ...”