“... surprising that the civilian worker behind the desk was alarmed. William was arrested, charged and held in police custody until he could attend court the following day.His social workers put all their efforts into keeping him out of jail. In Scotland, most offences involving under-eighteens are dealt with through the Children’s Hearings System (CHS). Set up ...”

“... Sam and set up business as a tailor out of the same three-room apartment on East 93rd Street that held Minna, her parents and the five boys; but the couple always had an air of waiting for something riper, and improvisation would become the family mood. With Sam, the nickname that finally stuck was Frenchy. He devoted his spare time to pinochle, whereas ...”

“... was also telling the readers of the New York Daily Tribune that he was ‘the man who is held by every party in England as the paragon of British statesmen’. Burke was revered by Tories and Liberals alike, if with rather different motives, not just for his torrential eloquence but as a politician who somehow transcended politics and as a ...”

“... ascertainable consequences. Not all were published, for fear of prejudicing the trials of those held responsible. But the Commission did make known that an estimated eleven thousand disappeared without explanation; that they were almost certainly murdered; that about twenty thousand people had been arrested, most of whom were beaten, tortured or raped; and ...”

“... artwork, but as a banner, an assertion of community solidarity to be marched down the street, held high on poles attached to the grommets that punctuate the canvas edges. Affirmative depiction, we are to believe, is this artist’s agenda. When it comes to the Black American experience, switch round the story!But nothing is quite that simple. It is more ...”

“... picked Edwards, and despite the spectacular lack of personal chemistry between them, the two men held it together long enough to come tantalisingly close to victory. Unsurprisingly, both Edwardses blamed both Kerrys for the ultimate failure to unseat Bush. They thought Kerry ran a lacklustre campaign, that Teresa was a drag from the start, and that only ...”

“... farcical, as the loss and recovery of his bones intertwines with the tempestuous fate of Italy. David Bowe reads Dante in dialogue with other lyricists of the duecento, while George Corbett examines his ethics and politics, appraising his magisterial synthesis of Aristotelian and Christian thought. John Took asks ‘why Dante matters’ and responds by ...”

“... disintegrated along with the mood he had captured and now seems inseparable from its time. Yet as David Como observes the book has earned ‘an enduring audience far beyond the walls of the academy’. It has also had a persistent influence inside them. When it appeared, the Levellers and Diggers had long been on the scholarly map, but the religious sects ...”

“... East as they were.’ This meant that the region had returned to its old patterns. The crowd held its breath: Islam’s desire to conquer the West was in the air. Lewis confirmed it. He said that the Muslims’ first attempt to conquer the world took place in Europe in the eighth century, and the second took place when the Ottomans occupied ...”

“... a welcome end to their journey. ‘There was great joy to see the land,’ the Baptist preacher David George recalled. ‘The high mountain, at some distance . . . appeared like a cloud to us.’ They had retched and ached through seven weeks of storms and pernicious fevers at sea. Now they raised three cheers and fired a salute. Their British officers ...”

“... red satin pants she had sewn were probably the least of her efforts. Doris’s father, William, held himself apart from all that. He seems to have been a silent, cold man – barely present to his children and wife. He taught music and gave voice lessons, conducted a choir and played the organ at the local Catholic church, although he was forced to give ...”

“... can’t give the impression of looking inside a mind directly, and must find its own equivalents. David Lean declared that in The Passionate Friends (1949) he had succeeded in photographing thought, though he was referring not to the film as a whole but to one sequence, in which Claude Rains’s character jumps to the conclusion that his wife is having an ...”

“... James Gandolfini, playing an incorrigibly mean-minded godfather for seven years, strangely held on to the affection of most of his mass audience. James Cagney had his moments of deadpan nastiness, but there’s the mother thing. Perhaps George Raft came close, but I suspect that’s more the result of moribund acting. There isn’t any doubt about ...”

“... as if they’d just been done with Persil in a boil wash. One of those long summer days, my friend David and I got caught after stealing powdered floor cleaner from the local supermarket and pouring a huge mound of it in a doorway. The manager went in search of our mothers and made them pay for our strange artwork. They brought buckets, ...”

“... If the publishers thought they were going to get the kind of sputtering firework that one of David Frost’s script associates might help him deliver into a tape-recorder, they haven’t. This is a book meant to be read and even kept. Indeed it might have more keepers than readers, since a probable majority of buyers will be the people mentioned in the ...”