“... Good. Now I’m heading the right direction. Away from the quaint North. Away from lobsters and white churches and Civil War graveyards and cracker barrel bazaars. Toward the swamps, the Bayou, the Cajuns, the cotton mouth, the Mardi Gras, the crocodile. The story exemplifies the imaginative gift which has made Shepard uniquely successful in his attempts ...”

“... the rivalries of race, region and class, pronunciation is obviously important, and grammar too, as William Labov has effectively shown in his studies of Black English: but the most visible differentiations are borne by idiom and vocabulary. What you call things raises you up, puts you down, or sets you just where you choose to be. (When I was a boy, we called ...”

“... Spitting Image to present her forty years later as a gin-swilling commoner. Since then death and William Shawcross have done little to humanise her. His biography was pious to a degree and, like his equally fulsome edition of her letters, much too long.* Despite all of which a personality, powerful and in some ways admirable and unusual, manages to break ...”

“... that the Oscar Wilde of ‘The Decay of Lying’ would feel far more at home in the America of William Jefferson Clinton than in that of its most esteemed founding father. For whatever else may be accused of falling into decay these days, public mendacity has surely enjoyed a robust revival. The most memorable quotations from our national leaders are no ...”

“... books on economic globalisation and development go in for grand plans and sweeping reforms. In The White Man’s Burden, William Easterly, for 16 years an economist at the World Bank, extols the virtues of thinking small when trying to help the poor. He argues that the urge to plan a country’s path to prosperity, without ...”

“... to wage his global war on terror. Yet with George W. Bush a president in the mould of William McKinley or Warren Harding – an affable man of modest talent whose rise in national politics could be attributed primarily to his perceived electability – Cheney and his collaborators were engaged in an effort to enhance their own clout. Bush might ...”

“... In his memoir, Burning the Days (1997), James Salter tells a story about an encounter between William Faulkner and an officer from the local airbase in Greenville, Mississippi in the early 1950s. They talk of the excitement of flying, and Faulkner drunkenly reminisces about his days as a pilot in France during the First World War ...”

“... William Godwin’s​ attack on aristocratic oppression in the Enquiry concerning Political Justice didn’t pull its punches. ‘Each man,’ he wrote, ‘should be wise enough to govern himself, without the intervention of any compulsory restraint; and, since government, even in its best state, is an evil, the object principally to be aimed at is, that we should have as little of it, as the general peace of society will permit ...”

“... slimness of his boyish figure, the slenderness of the bare legs that protruded from his billowing white shorts, one of the legs folding back and resting on the other knee.’ As they left the café, Wilde asked Gide if he wanted the boy. Gide nervously said that he did. Wilde, having made the arrangements, laughed uproariously as his suspicions about Gide’s ...”

“... with some of the most prominent interwar painters, including Ivon Hitchens, Ceri Richards and William Coldstream. With Coldstream he became a founder of the Euston Road School, and financial support from Kenneth Clark, then the innovative young director of the National Gallery, allowed him to give up the day job. This is where the Pallant House exhibition ...”

“... a preferable spot to any other. A sparkle of sunshine on the breakers, a dazzling gleam from the white foam, a warm sweet air, light and brightness and champagniness; altogether lovely. The way in which people lie about on the beach, their legs this way and their arms that, their hats over their eyes, their utter give-themselves-up expression of attitude is ...”

“... from drawing the obvious corollaries today – while, in the next best, the FBI’s Director, William Webster, gives a clear factual account of his organisation’s activities in this field. The rest of the book, which is edited and partly written by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Ambassador to the UN and the brother of the hero of ...”

“... Like many people​ who keep meaning to get round to things, William Henry Fox Talbot was disheartened to discover, early in 1839, that a rival had claimed credit for something he’d been experimenting with for years. On 7 January, it was announced to the Académie des Sciences in Paris that Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre had permanently fixed images created by light ...”

“... enough pulling a face. Cezanne’s private puzzling – just how should masses of lemon and lead white converse? – slips into provocative teasing. No, that plate on the right could hardly have perched in that way on a three-dimensional kitchen table, and yes, the fruit on it perform a balancing act that seems outright miraculous. But painters have always ...”

“... blasts that shook the building. Jennings came back on to announce a briefing by Larry Speakes, the White House press spokesman; back to Tripoli for the end of the raid (it was now 7:10 or so), a couple of commercials, and then down to Speakes in Washington. He read a prepared statement with his customary virtuosity, stumbling over nearly every syllable and yet ...”