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“... therefore became, so to speak, theatrical squared. Their situation also made them competitive. As Michael Young was to point out in The Rise of the Meritocracy, élites based on education lack the security of the old aristocracies of land and money. To live by one’s wits is a nervous business: every younger brain, each new ...”

“... jungle is rich with bright red pitcher plants and among the clear glades of vast trees, easy under foot, you can hear the high notes of a gibbon or see a startled deer. Twenty years later in Irian Jaya at the far end of Indonesia, the river was far from the village and bathing was rare. The moss forest was cramped, cold and difficult. There were no ...”

“... knows, the relief of that, the pub, the slope down into Newman Passage, the opening sequence of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, a puddle of bloody neon, awkward stone setts, smokers in doorways; and then out, immediately, into another world, Newman Street. Black leather, chrome, complimentary coffee. Film, television, advertising. Bikers with ...”

“... No American writer​ ever revealed more in a photograph than Joan Didion. She was small, five foot one and three-quarter inches tall, which she fudged on her California driver’s licence as five two. She weighed nothing. Somewhere there must be a photograph of her beaming with delight but I’ve never seen it. With age, her neck thinned ...”

“... latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot.’ The place is specific the familiar Hardy country; the time is almost as closely defined; the people are archetypal man, woman, child. The man’s name is withheld until the morning of terrible sobriety after he realises that he has sold his wife at the ...”

“... up years ago – and because of it too: the pace of change has picked up since then. The mayor, Michael Bloomberg, sometimes talks about the importance of tourism to New York as if tourists were more important to the city than its inhabitants, but when you consider that 44 million tourists visited the city last year – an increase of 25 per cent since 2001 ...”

“... decade of settlement, with Collins dead, opinions and divisions hardened. The one-time highwayman Michael Howe, who called himself the ‘lieutenant governor of the woods’, had carved out a fiefdom through his control of access to the grasslands, in covert league with leading men in the colony and with a tough squad of convict bushmen to back him. He also ...”

“... again.‘Oh. My. God – yes!’ my neighbour offered. I know she was real because she stood on my foot and I stubbornly trust the link between cause and effect.Like birds in Narnia, pairs of quote-marks came flapping into view. The huge speakers vibrated with ‘life’, then Whitney ‘came on’ wearing – or ‘wearing’ – a gold glittery dress and, in ...”

“... way, chased it and kicked it five metres the other, then struck it emphatically into the goal, my foot at shoulder height. There was no net so it dribbled sadly into the distance. I’d never scored before and wheeled away in triumph before I noticed that no one else was celebrating. I had scored the most egregious of own goals. You’re Black, you’re a ...”

“... castle on the private island of Brecqhou (as did Tony Blair and David Cameron), and on their 197-foot yacht, the Lady Beatrice. Not long after her death, a bronze bust of Thatcher was installed in the Ritz’s lobby.By then the brothers had been in the hotel business for half a century. Born within ten minutes of each other in 1934, they grew up in a family ...”

“... who did not intend or desire or expect that to be the result’. Laura Mitchell and her boyfriend, Michael Hall, stopped for a drink at the King’s Head in Buttershaw, Bradford on a Saturday night out in 2007. At about 2 a.m. they and some friends left the pub and got into a taxi outside. The taxi turned out to have been booked by someone else and a fight ...”

“... his father had him locked up for a few minutes in a police cell, an episode that became, as Michael Wood puts it, the ‘myth of origin’ for his powerful distrust of authority. Ackroyd rummages dutifully for further evidence. Was young Alfred beaten at school by a ‘black-robed Jesuit’? Or caught out in the open when the Zeppelins raided London in ...”

“... it is unforgivably coarse: in what it does to Rilke (‘The dark was heavier than Caesar’s foot’), to the Matratzengruft, the mattress-grave of the dying Heine (‘my dear German public is goosestepping home, yawning’), to a nandrolone Baudelaire, unaccountably admired by Eliot: ‘Among the vermin, jackals, panthers, lice,/gorillas and tarantulas ...”

“... press has a variegated record on miscarriages of justice. At its best it has journalists like Paul Foot who have doggedly reinvestigated cases nobody else would listen to. At its worst the press can be a source of prejudice that, as the case of the Taylor sisters powerfully demonstrates, actually promotes miscarriages of justice. Between these poles its ...”

“... recognition enacted by both the audience and the characters in the fiction: Oedipus means ‘swell-foot’, but the sense ‘know-foot’ hidden in his name becomes painfully audible towards the end of his story. Ajax hears the resemblance between his name and ‘aiai’, a cry of agony, in Sophocles’ tragedy about his ...”