“... and Perret has dug up important new material. MacArthur was born in a dusty US Army post at Little Rock, Arkansas, on 26 January 1880. His first memory, he often said, was ‘the sound of bugles’. The MacArthur clan were not, as he often hinted, fierce Highland warriors; his lawyer grandfather had emigrated to the US in 1828 from Glasgow. His father, then ...”

“... of Robert Louis Stevenson. Kidnapped was really our favourite, but we couldn’t call our daughter David, or name her after Alan Breck. She’d have to be named for the sequel.Like all my contemporaries, in those first years when the contraceptive pill was widely available, I only half believed I could coerce my body, and suspected that it might have some ...”

“... telling me he drove both a BMW and a Renault and that he used to be a bodyguard for the 1970s rock groups Slade and Mud. It was clear he felt he had led a progressive life, and he seemed very composed as he pulled and hauled at the steering wheel. By then the sky had become bluer and people were beginning to queue at the bus stops, heading for ...”

“... Dante, Boccaccio, More, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, Bayle, Voltaire, Sterne, Diderot, David, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Warburg, Proust, Kracauer, Picasso and many more, each an extraordinary display of learning. No other living historian approaches the range of this erudition. Every page of Threads and Traces, his latest work to appear in ...”

“... to station with the seek button – derangingly – every two or three seconds. Burbly soft rock, stale oldies, Dean Martin singing Christmas carols, Mexican polka music, endless mirthless ads for Petco and Wal-Mart – the full auditory wasteland of American popular culture assailed us. Shades of when we used to be girlfriends. We bickered most of the ...”

“... he would justify the company’s treatment of expense to the SEC, the WorldCom company controller, David Myers, acknowledged that he ‘had hoped it would not have to be explained’. On the other hand, he countered, if WorldCom’s reported costs weren’t somehow reduced and its profits enhanced, ‘the company might as well shut its doors.’ Crucial to ...”

“... Grace Academy in Brixton. The programme was launched in 2000 by the then education secretary, David Blunkett, who explained that if sponsors put up £2 million, or 20 per cent of the capital costs, such ‘businesses, individuals, churches or voluntary bodies’ would get ‘considerable freedom over management structures and processes’, and of course a ...”

“... per cent – approved the deal Wilson had obtained. British membership of the Common Market looked rock solid. When Thatcher took over four years later, and promptly abolished exchange controls, releasing the City for further European deals, it strengthened again. By the mid-1980s, the British economy was outperforming its counterparts on the Continent, even ...”

“... it was in the nature of her job that she didn’t have hobbies. Jogging, growing roses, chess or rock climbing, cake decoration, model aeroplanes. No. Hobbies involved preferences and preferences had to be avoided; preferences excluded people. One had no preferences. Her job was to take an interest, not to be interested herself. And besides, reading wasn’t ...”

“... of all supernatural beliefs. How far it has failed to do so can be judged from the verdict of David Shankland, one of the most sympathetic analysts of Turkish faith and society, not to speak of the statesmanship of Erdogan himself: ‘There is not the slightest doubt,’ he writes in Islam and Society in Turkey, ‘that it is now dangerous for a man or ...”