“... in the same year, his body man Reggie Love points out an image of a man’s face carved in the stone: ‘Not the profile typical of hieroglyphics but a straight-on head shot. A long, oval face. Prominent ears sticking out like handles. A cartoon of me, somehow forged in antiquity.’ They have a good laugh about it, but Obama is not smiling on the ...”

“... through the windows of Newcastle’s law courts. Inside Court One, the prosecuting barrister, Richard Wright, was about to show a video of the murder scene. Wright has a commanding presence and an instinct for the dramatic. What the jurors were about to see was disturbing, he said. There would be blood, although Nikki’s body would be pixellated. Boyd ...”

“... Kramer, Charles Murray, Paul Craig Roberts, Irving Kristol, even such names for the connoisseur as Richard Cornuelle – they are among the fruits of a mutually beneficial association. For on the one side, there are limits to local supply – the efforts of Conor Cruise O’Brien, Paul Johnson or Norman Stone, however ...”

“... and readiness to help. But Gamlin lived his double life in the country that existed before Cliff Richard. On the back of his broadcasting fame, and his other interests, he became a spokesman on the tribulations of the Ovalteens. At the Albert Hall in 1949, he followed the Duke of Edinburgh and Clement Attlee in speaking at the Daily Mail Youth Forum – an ...”

“... is Lynch’s most violent film and his most image-obsessed, a quality that Tarantino and Oliver Stone would immediately rip off in Natural Born Killers, though neither would touch the sweet side of kitsch that Lynch embraced. He understood that what made Hollywood over the top – its clichés, its emotionalism, its moral polarisation – was also what made ...”

“... Most of them were developed under Andrew Adonis’s academies programme for New Labour: the Richard Rogers-designed Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney, which opened in 2004, is one of these, as is Zaha Hadid’s Evelyn Grace Academy in Brixton. The programme was launched in 2000 by the then education secretary, David Blunkett, who explained that if ...”

“... its time, the book has had its admirers – my battered 1970s paperback carries endorsements from Richard Hughes, Naomi Mitchison and C.S. Lewis, and Auden was an early fan. (Auden was a patron saint of lost causes. He was also the only major writer to stand up for Laura Riding.) But mostly, the sort of people who get their opinions published have lashed it ...”

“... over all the drawers in the work table in the spare room. Blakey rolls her eyes, sits down, pulls Richard Rorty out of her bag and prepares to wait for several hours.I guess I left this part out earlier: that I’m as ‘arty’ as my old mum. Can’t help it: it’s a mutant gene, like homosexuality. And though I can neither draw nor paint I’m fairly good ...”

“... theatrical career had flourished to the point where she no longer needed Gustaf as stepping-stone; that Gustaf had finally realised his marriage to Erika would not bestow on him her father’s impeccable social credentials.’ Pamela Wedekind married a man old enough to be her father, and the foursome returned to being the twosome of Erika and Klaus ...”

“... in the cities, the AKP needs to offer something more than the bread – it is not yet quite a stone – of neoliberalism. Lack of social redistribution requires cultural or political compensations. There were also the party’s cadres to be considered: a mere diet of IMF prescriptions was bound to leave them hungry. The pitfalls of too conformist an ...”

“... whose lectures he attended; gripped by the engagé theatre of Sartre and Camus, and the novels of Richard Wright and Chester Himes. He was also reading Jaspers, Nietzsche, Hegel, Bergson, Bachelard and Lacan – the ‘logician of madness’, he called him, partly in jest. He dreaded the ‘larval, stocky, obsolete life that awaits me once I’ve finished my ...”

“... neither sleep with him nor marry him. The advantage for any biographer is that if you throw a stone in Buenos Aires you are likely to hit one of these women or their many descendants, or indeed their books of memoir. Since there is nothing much to do in the city, other than bang saucepans together as a protest against government policy, discussing ...”

“... of 1955, one remembered in Scotland for its long procession of warm and cloudless days. We climbed stone stairs and looked into bare stone rooms. It was tremendously dull. Everything of interest lay outside. I was ten and keen on ships, and through dusty windows I could see a much more attractive world, and hear it, too ...”

“... I hate to say it, but it can be very helpful to us. I mean you hear a singer even as brilliant as Richard Tucker and he’s a Jew. HALDEMAN: Is he? NIXON: He’s pushy … HALDEMAN: There are a lot more anti-Semites than there are Jews, and the anti-Semites are with us generally and the Jews sure aren’t. The Breast was a grotesque fable out of Kafka ...”