“... literature where our recommendations may have been discussed. The system of criminal justice, by which I understand not only the procedures for dealing with suspects, defendants, and appellants, but also the principles on which those procedures rest, is a topic on which feelings can and often do run high. The way in which the Commission interpreted its ...”

“... has made a good showing. Above all, it has taken political and military instability in Africa to be a market issue – that of massive unmet demand for security – and positioned itself perfectly in that market. Executive Outcomes thrives on the absence of civility, consensus, law and order; its biggest operations so far have been in countries with valuable ...”

“... the rallies and protests and clandestine gatherings of the Fifties and Sixties as logically capped by the disco-circuit hedonism of the Seventies, and a time when many of those men still seemed to view any attack on that hedonism as the ultimate affront to their political and personal freedom – Larry Kramer remarked that just staying alive had become a ...”

“... throughout the Report. Before this Act, control of the export of goods out of Britain was governed by the royal prerogative and the common law. The Second World War made a more coherent framework essential and the emergency powers in this statute provided it. That they were then considered to be of a temporary nature was ...”

“... was well and truly in possession of a corpse; that the corpses of the Ogoni Nine, as they came to be called, were thrown into a mass grave and then soaked in acid; and, finally, that the entire sordid event was videotaped and the result rushed to Abuja, the administrative capital. It turned out, however, that the execution was just a wanton demonstration of ...”

“... intellectual companionship – in music, poetry and trench-life. In the end, all reasoning had to be here, inside. Outside became for him one vastly simplified establishment of Church and Metropolitan Police, to which he would write long and, if you choose to see them so, quite dotty pleas, sometimes in verse, against his continuing incarceration. The world ...”

“... This state of precarious liberty lasted only until 30 May, when he was fatally stabbed by a man named Ingram Frizer, though whether his sudden death was a matter of coincidence or conspiracy remains unresolved. The Council’s warrant does not give a reason for Marlowe’s arrest, but we know it was connected to the arrest of his colleague Thomas ...”

“... Pale of Settlement, as if they were a dangerous virus, and wanting to swallow and absorb them by destroying their separate identity. Twenty-five sounds suspiciously like a mythic number, but Russian reality has often had a mythic quality, so it is possible that some such scheme at one time existed, and even a much shorter term of military service would ...”

“... 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 ...”