“... his schtick made room for the idea that he was a lovable old fraud.Riesman’s biography isn’t a straight-up demolition job. It includes a photograph of its author as an adolescent ‘circa 1998’ getting Lee to sign a comic, and aims for the tone of a fan who’s trying to be generous about his sometimes disappointing findings. Riesman doesn’t always ...”

“... had “schematised” them to conform to his argument.’ There’s a line – though not a straight one – between these early-century episodes and the disputes over Haeckel’s pictures that broke out in the 1990s. One new element was introduced by academic biologists wholly convinced of the fact of evolution. A group led by the English embryologist ...”

“... verbal and narrative digression. Fiction never quite presents anything as simple as an absolutely straight Cratylic name, which instantly manifests a character and a nature in a word. In a narrative or a drama there is necessarily some delay between the revelation of a name and the manifestation of a character’s nature. Even in allegories – which it’s ...”

“... in the country’s history, contested by two sons of the light-skinned post-independence elite: Michael Manley, the leader of the social democratic People’s National Party, and Edward Seaga, the leader of the conservative Jamaica Labour Party. The Jamaican system of ‘garrisons’ – social housing estates, usually built over bulldozed shantytowns, run ...”

“... unit. Some of the stories obtained this way were trivial, though intrusive: George Michael wept in his jail cell, for example, or a male British Airways worker secretly wore high heels. Others were more serious: security lapses at Heathrow, or equipment shortages in Afghanistan. Almost anything could be obtained if the offer was big enough: in ...”

“... on the incoming secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and Trump’s now ex-national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The rhetoric emanating from US politicians and media commentators too seems to be drawn from another era. In November, a murky online group called PropOrNot went full McCarthy by releasing ‘The List’, designed to name and shame – or indeed ...”

“... not being ingratiating enough or trying to explain what the ‘drain problem’ was and graduating straight to the frenzied banging on the door; ‘your boyfriend’ didn’t help either. Like all crooks he was affronted when his honesty was questioned, if only because it implied a criticism of his performance. 4 February. I don’t imagine that my old Oxford ...”

“... have in common. He happened once to mention what he (as a head of department) pays new recruits, straight out of university: ‘45k a year, with a bonus of between ten and twelve grand guaranteed.’ I pointed out that in many cases that would mean these 22-year-olds would be earning more than the heads of department in the universities they’d just ...”

“... to put his own spin on the tragedy – and, indeed, on the romance. Within days of the car crash, Michael Cole – al-Fayed’s ultra-Brit PR man – was feeding the newspapers sugary tidbits from the couple’s final hours. Diana, he said, had given Dodi a pair of cufflinks that had once belonged to her father. Dodi had responded with a ‘Tell me ...”

“... on 78 records, 48 of them LPs. The compliments paid to him have been extravagant and impressive. Michael Foot sees resemblances to both Chaplin and Swift, describing him as ‘a comic genius’. The tribute is topped by Robert Graves, for whom Spike is ‘a great genius’. The Monty Python team are cited as finding him not just the original precursor of ...”

“... told him. ‘You can save your flub-dub and shoot it to New York by mail. What I want is the straight story of the fight.’ But it was the flub-dub that separated Crane from journeyman reporters. Richard Harding Davis, who had known but not much liked Crane in Greece, came away from Cuba with a changed view. In Harper’s Magazine after the shooting ...”

“... servants, craftsmen and even beggars were also taxed on mostly imaginary wealth, and thus sent straight to work camps. The then immense sum of 324 million liras (equivalent to more than $4 billion in 2015) was collected in 15 days of frantic discounting of bonds, loans and deposits, panicked selling and rapacious buying, followed by the removal of those ...”

“... in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions’. He quotes the brain scientist Michael Merzenich, a pioneer of neuroplasticity and the man behind the monkey experiments in the 1960s, to the effect that the brain can be ‘massively remodelled’ by exposure to the internet and online tools like Google. ‘THEIR HEAVY USE HAS NEUROLOGICAL ...”

“... in sight. The provenance of figures like Robert Orr, head of ‘strategic planning’, lifted straight from the National Security Council in Washington, Louise Fréchette, deputy secretary-general, dispatched from the Defense Ministry in Ottawa, or, lower down the scale, theorists of humanitarian intervention from Harvard or Princeton like John Ruggie and ...”

“... as a ‘burning’, a ‘sickness’, a ‘poison’, a ‘wound’ and an ‘arrow’ passing ‘straight into my innards’. These hints of physicality almost feel like something he’s failed to airbrush out of the story, but nothing in a Petrarch poem is there by mistake. He lets us see that the long aftermath of mournful idealising – the classic trope ...”