“... I will do and what I won’t do. Fourthly, he’s full of new ideas all the time. And, finally, we’ve been together so long that he not only understands me, I understand him. This says a good deal about both men. One is a big Babbitt; a Babbitt on a global scale. The other is a Babbitt more in the Osric mould: a tenth-rater who knows how to make himself ...”

“... Khaled was important. For the Gulf War, after massive arms purchases from the West had discredited George Bush’s promise to reduce the level of weapons in the Middle East, ended as a net profit to the Western alliance, fought by young men from Glasgow and Detroit but paid for by the man who likes to call himself the ‘Guardian of the Two Holy ...”

“... you to wonder where you might be. The bit of the journey with not a lot to look at is the bit we tend to remember (55 per cent of the London Underground system runs above ground). Dull, unforgiving tunnels exacerbate our awareness of the time that still remains before space will once again resume with a welcome savage rush. And there’s a further, even ...”

“... now likes to call herself’ – while he was in jail. Mann’s account doesn’t add much to what we know about the attempted coup; in some respects it tells us less than Adam Roberts’s excellent The Wonga Coup.* Roberts names more names than Mann does, including Jeffrey Archer’s (he may have donated money), and gives some broad hints as to the identity ...”

“... is no sculpture to it, and Marochetti died in 1867. As for those undisciplined evergreens, neither bush nor tree, bickering and collapsing shapelessly into one another, were they really cypresses, deformed from their true Italian straightness and nobility? The church was open but the verger could not tell me: ‘To me a tree is just a tree.’ Chaotic in ...”

“... will inevitably collapse.’ So what would yesterday’s doomsayers have us expect today? Must we now kiss goodbye to the deterrent value of perjury law? Should we really pack our bags, fold our tents and prepare for American liberty to expire and the American legal system to crumble into dust? However preposterous this ...”

“... ball, but once you leave hospital, the GP becomes your access to any help,’ she explained. ‘We fell foul of a lot of reforms that have taken place.’ Fisher was 48 when he died, ‘an influential writer, music blogger and university lecturer’, the Ipswich Star reported, who taught in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths in South-East ...”

“... Stewart Parnell before the Special Commission set up after publication in the Times of what we now know as the Pigott forgeries. (These were documents which quite wrongly linked Parnell to the murder in 1882 of two leading members of the British Administration in Ireland.) The Commission was a ruse devised to destroy Parnell’s reputation, and one into ...”

“... ever since he was his fag at school. Raffles calms him down and tells him that he is broke too: ‘We’re in the same boat, Bunny; we’d better pull together.’ And so begins their rackety partnership in crime, with repeatedly calamitous results: the rewards of their villainy are scant, the fences with whom they deal ...”

“... doctor (Roger Livesey) had been shot at Shere, a picturesque hamlet below Newlands Corner where we’d sometimes go on walks. Livesey watches the goings-on in the village via a camera obscura, though why he does this isn’t explained or the workings of the device either, which must have mystified most people at the time. The notion of eavesdropping keeps ...”

“... excitement but were then alarmed at the chaotic transition to crony capitalism under Yeltsin: ‘We came to Moscow as political correspondents. We leave as crime reporters.’ The ex-Soviet Central Asian republics travelled a similar path from one-party authoritarianism to a highly corrupt form of the market but – with ...”

“... and ruled by repressive regimes. Washington has sponsored one military coup after another. George Kennan sketched out the programme in 1950, promising ‘coercive measures which can impress other governments with the danger of antagonising us’. In 1961 a strategy note prepared for Kennedy by the Joint Chiefs of Staff advised: ‘Latin Americans must ...”

“... the Great Tradition, texts as unlike each other, and as unlike Emma, as Pilgrim’s Progress and W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions. No one’s arguing about Emma. But Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegorical dream-vision; while Green Mansions (a story set in the forests of western Guyana featuring a female spirit-presence, a lost tribe, and enough ...”

“... find this sort of avoidance common. Also, the narrative stops at around the millennium, short of Bush, Iraq, 9/11, the war on terror. This gives it a peculiar time-lapse quality, as noticeable in its pop references as in its thoughts on bombs and bombing: who, since the massive record release and tour of 2004, could now think of Smile as ‘lost’? An even ...”

“... for New Yorkers: an empathic connection was forged with many families of the victims, and Governor George Pataki, perhaps the biggest fish in this particular pond (he controlled the selection of the LMDC), also swallowed it, hook, line and sinker. Eventually, two finalists were announced: Libeskind and Think (Viñoly, Frederick Schwartz, Ken Smith and Shigeru ...”