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“... for a group of silicate minerals with a fibrous structure. Chrysotile, amosite and crocidolite – white, brown and blue asbestos – are the most common varieties. Its remarkable insulating and fire-resistant properties have been known for millennia, but asbestos only began to be used on an industrial scale in the last quarter of the 19th century. Large-scale ...”

“... the blurbs at the front of her 1994 Collected Stories, she receives that compliment from both Edmund White and Philip Roth). Still, A Grace Paley Reader, the most recent posthumous collection of her work, in giving some of her lectures and occasional pieces equal space beside samplings of the poems and the better-known stories, celebrates Paley the ...”

“... tragic – reflected in the reader’s responses as the narrative develops. The story is this. Edmund Sin is a Chicago-born American, of Chinese parentage. We meet him first as the sad narrator, in sight of his 60th birthday, mourning the loss of a wife he has belatedly learned to love, looking back over forty years to another self, squaring accounts with ...”

“... the logical end of the road for all kinds of rootless victims of American society, both black and white. The florid style makes for difficult reading, but what does come through is that Jones, like other charismatic leaders, held his adherents together by a kind of inverted terrorism – whipping up the belief that all the resources of the American Government ...”

“... Fourteen years ago, Edmund Morris won the job of writing the official Reagan biography. With the job came all kinds of unprecedented access. Morris was allowed to attend senior staff meetings at the White House and to travel as part of the Presidential entourage on foreign trips ...”

“... the noise was coming from and switched it on for a second. In the brief flare of light he saw two white faces turn and look up from a trench-sap dug deep under the base of the tomb. He saw a man with a black moustache and a very fair young boy’s face and the turning spindle of a roll of telephone wire being unwound – squeaking quietly. There’s a sure ...”

“... the shanty towns that had a strong scent of washing powder’), 1930s Cairo (‘buildings with white balconies and Arabic slogans painted on the plaster … basket-sellers and awnings and at the end of the road a gold-and-white minaret’) and 1630s Lavenham (‘much wet with rain’). But the writing becomes ...”

“... Graveyard of St Peter-in-the-East, St Edmund HallFor E.M.Snowdrop, snowdrop, tell:what news of the underground,the weather in Hell?Your toes are tickledby the beards of the dead, theirslanted stones deckledand foxed with lichen-rings of shaggy galaxies.In flocks you beckonme to read shallow-graven names on time-thumbed tomes ...”

“... jerky and half swamp … his softer parts – groin, stomach, eyes – swim with greenish-white pools of maggots.’ As the days pass, bits of the corpse start to fall off: ‘a toe, a piece of scalp, a tooth, another finger’. Zhang insists that none of this is about her own father. She’s right – in a sense – but the gory passages wouldn’t ...”

“... taken to mean many things apart from indissoluble union, but even (or especially) on this reading Edmund White finds the image ‘chilling’, and George Painter has this to say: If [Mme Proust’s] words were given their full, terrible meaning they would imply a mystic union with her son more valid than her marriage, in an alien faith, to his ...”

“... Edmund Burke is easily the most significant intellectual in politics these islands ever produced. Infinitely more profound and productive than his nearest 18th-century equivalent, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, he was also far more prominent in national politics over a much longer span than John Milton or the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury in the 17th century, J ...”

“... back with two ink stamps on it: ‘Undelivered’ and ‘Killed in Action’. Albert was 16. The white stones reel away across the grass in sightlines that open and close, thousand upon thousand, and you might expect to feel that after the first five or six war cemeteries you have seen them all. But each one is sharply different. Albert can be found in Berks ...”

“... sent the young author a three-page analysis of The Jungle and an invitation to visit him at the White House for further discussion. These events led directly to the passing of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act (although not, to Sinclair’s chagrin, to the drafting of new legislation promoting workers’ rights. ‘I aimed for ...”

“... to paint a portrait of integrity and rectitude as an exemplar of what was wanting in the Clinton White House. Books about Franklin D. Roosevelt and, above all, Abraham Lincoln have long since become a cottage industry. FDR’s elder cousin, Theodore, who occupied the White House from 1901 to 1909, has not exactly been ...”

“... her, she was burned with five other humble people outside the town walls of Colchester. Rawlins White was burned; he was an illiterate Cardiff fisherman. William Hunter was 19 years old, a silk-weaver’s apprentice; a priest sneered at him: ‘It is a merye worlde when such as thou arte shall teache us what is the truth.’ Thomas Tomkins, a weaver, was ...”