“... I was part of a small team working on a political magazine for international distribution. He was wearing shades and slumped down on a chair next to my desk. Then, without any preamble he lowered his voice: ‘I killed Rahim last night.’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Rahim, aka Clinton Smith, had escaped from prison in California with a fellow ...”

“... she’s ‘such a Tory’. This is not a time for girly-swot politics talk. The ‘court of King David’, she observes, feels as if it is ‘actually the government’. ‘They are all here, the ones that eat, drink, party together … We all holiday together … we text each other bypassing the civil servants … it’s enough to repulse the ordinary ...”

“... I would guess, advise Park View on the shot on the front of its spring 2015 newsletter: a girl wearing a mask with the Union flag painted on it, her eyes half-shut behind the eyeholes, her mouth unsmiling under the little slit. She looks as though she has been forced by agents of an authoritarian, anti-individualistic ideology to cover her face in a way ...”

“... Requiem currently introduces the product in the Lurpak butter commercial.Walk behind a tramp wearing no socks. Heels like turnips.6 February. A. asks for help with finding questions for a charity literary quiz. Suggest:Q. Who thought the Venerable Bede was a woman?A. Field Marshal Haig, who said so after musing for some time beside the Venerable Bede’s ...”

“... from among the large volume of information that the police received: Jamie Acourt, Neil Acourt, David Norris and Gary Dobson. The names came from unreliable sources – an ex-girlfriend, youths with grudges against them. All four had been suspects in connection with previous acts of racial violence. Despite a barrage of teenage estate gossip with all the ...”

“... and I think she felt judged. A week later, she invited me back. Her house was tidy and she was wearing a pink blouse. A photograph of William in his burgundy blazer stood on the mantelpiece. His sister Chloe, then nineteen, had stopped by. Bear ran to the window and back again. Christine told me that Shannon – who had been heavily pregnant at William’s ...”

“... with the long red streamers of Nazidom’ (at St Anton, he noticed, even the station dog was wearing a swastika). The train finally arrived in Vienna, where troops marched down the Ringstrasse as German planes flew in formation overhead. Hitler’s portrait was displayed in all the shop windows on Kärntnerstrasse, ‘the Bond Street of Vienna’, and ...”

“... they wanted more. ‘The Muslims just hate us for our love of freedom,’ said a woman from Iowa wearing a cloth elephant on her head. ‘They don’t have any culture and they hate us for having a great one. And they hate the Bible.’ ‘Really?’ I said. ‘The Iraqis had a culture for thousands of years before Jesus was born.’ ‘What you ...”

“... together again in a shape other than that in which it was born.’ Stryker stood at the podium wearing what she calls ‘genderfuck drag’: combat boots, threadbare Levi 501s over a black lace bodysuit, a shredded Transgender Nation T-shirt with the neck and sleeves cut out, a pink triangle, quartz crystal pendant, grunge metal jewellery, and a six inch ...”

“... smell. Every member of a parade which by 11 a.m. will stretch through the middle of the town is wearing a large sprig of rosemary. (That, courtesy of Ophelia, is for remembrance, though the scent seems less funereal than paschal.) Most celebrants are also carrying substantial mixed bouquets – in the economic life of Stratford’s florists, Shakespeare is ...”

“... It was the moment, in the mid-1950s, when worlds were beginning to collide. Tennant’s uncle David ran the louche but artistic Gargoyle Club in Soho, where the old aristocracy mixed with the new celebrity. Princess Margaret met Lucian Freud and Ian Fleming; Tennant’s previous girlfriend, Ivy Nicholson, became part of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and Jeanne ...”

“... expound her work through her own body: eternally ‘an athlete of God’, as she herself says; a David before the Ark. Graham’s own book, finished just before she died and burdened with a reluctant acceptance of mortality in its last pages, nevertheless begins briskly: ‘I am a dancer.’ She knew she still was, although she gave her last performance in ...”

“... more you are doing, the less you know the more you are knowing, the less you wear the more you are wearing, and so say all of us. God loves a chancer more than he loves a trier, and the tabloid newspapers – who recognise no higher power than themselves – speak every day for a Britain that is perfectly in love with its cellphone democracy. This is William ...”

“... refuser (1853). Perhaps the two portrayals are not coincidental. In 1851, the Melville family read David Copperfield aloud as their evening entertainment. The pre-20th-century office worker saw himself as a cut above the unsalaried labouring masses, and was as ambivalent about his superiors, who were his only means of rising, as the rest of the working world ...”

“... Market, he knocked at the door of a little house at Causewayend. It was opened by a woman wearing an apron. Sensing her imminent retreat, Henderson quickly broke into a verse of ‘The Battle of Harlaw’, prompting Jeannie Robertson to let him in so that she might teach him to sing it properly. Scotland’s travelling clans were widely despised and ...”