“... lifetime could have allowed him to follow them all through.His friends and scientific colleagues John Herschel and David Brewster pressed Talbot to focus for long enough to publish his findings. ‘I have often wondered,’ Herschel wrote to him in 1833, ‘that being, as I am aware you are, in possession of a number of curious & interesting things in ...”

“... where they arrived at around 12.30 to find Knox, a pretty blonde girl, and Sollecito – tall, brown-haired, with glasses – loitering outside. Barbie Nadeau, the author of Angel Face: The True Story of Student Killer Amanda Knox (2010), says that they had a mop and bucket with them. In fact, Knox had taken a mop round to Sollecito’s apartment that ...”

“... who was then 73, was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst once described by the New York Times as ‘John Wayne in a blue suit’. He taught at Columbia and had co-authored a book about the usefulness of the interview in clinical situations. Didion was 66. She wasn’t seeing MacKinnon under duress: her daughter, Quintana, who was an alcoholic, had told her own ...”

“... of the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. Senator Kerry believes (though Senator Brown does not always agree) that his investigation was deliberately and continually impeded by the Bush Administration. The close proximity of Bush to Irangate and now to Iraqgate makes that seem very likely. For British readers, however, the Senator’s report ...”

“... and flat and powered by curiously bowed legs; her calves were still noticeably muscled above her brown lace-up shoes. She was a tennis and hockey blue and a Classicist who had definite academic ambitions for her school. The dining-room – I remember plastic beakers with stained and chewed rims, as well as fat, gristle, and semolina mixed with obscenely ...”

“... and then their grey successors. We were so happy when those fresh-faced challengers, the Blair/Brown and Clinton/Gore double acts, showed them the door. People smarter than I was probably foresaw the compromises that would follow, but I doubt any of us fully anticipated our financialised, deregulated world – a world in which we now individually struggle ...”

“... on disability benefit, so they wouldn’t show up in unemployment figures. In the early 1990s, John Major’s secretary of state for social security, Peter Lilley, began to focus on Invalidity Benefit, or, as he called it, ‘bad back benefit’. Announcing his intention to close down ‘the something-for-nothing society’ at the Conservative Party ...”

“... her to West Germany. She takes as her motif the startling quotation from the Revelations of St John: ‘And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the ...”

“... over the years: fear of Scargill, fear of Galtieri, fear of inflation, fear of black and brown people. And in 1987, whatever the raggedness in the presentation of her own policies, she played it again to perfection. In a book clearly designed to serve the interests of the Lord Young-Tim Bell faction in the intrigues around the Peacock Throne, the ...”

“... chest, turn engagingly puce, and roar ‘I am a Viking’ before destroying Geoff Capes, Grizzly Brown and all comers at the who-can-turn-over-most-cars-in-sixty-seconds contest. It may be only at the level of Raquel Welch, the leather bikini and One Million Years BC, but Old Norse literature and mythology has made its mark on European and American culture ...”

“... for example, a head as simple as a bean seed.) Later there were American connections – in 1916 John Quinn began collecting his work; he knew the photographers Edward Steichen and Man Ray – and Romanian connections, which were maintained all his life. There is hardly a significant name which does not turn up in some context or other, from Picasso and the ...”

“... on them. The waterfront becomes a place of longing, and Mitchell writes of it as hauntingly as John Lee Hooker sang of it. In 1938 Mitchell was hired by Harold Ross as a staff writer for the New Yorker, though his first contribution to the magazine had been published in 1933. He took up with writers like Philip Hamburger, S.J. Perelman and James ...”

“... generation but he was doomed never to succeed. Partly it was because he wasn’t clubbable: as John Biffen, an admirer, noted sadly, he was ‘devastatingly self-contained’. But, far more, it was the speech that had put him beyond the pale, not only because of the allegations of racism which dogged him for ever after but because the Parliamentary élite ...”

“... could order the fragments in her own way; but even this seems rather too programmatic, a bit too John Cage. It is certainly better to dip into the book than to read it through – one of the many endearing things about Pessoa is that he makes conscientiousness seem silly – and the fragments should be read as a series of bulletins, without assuming one ...”

“... justice, tax evasion, squandering public money and undermining democracy. Once the Burrell and Brown/ Havlik trials collapsed, the finger pointed directly at the Sovereign herself, who emerged (depending on one’s preferred theory) as Machiavellian, culpably misinformed, vindictive or simply gaga. Whatever the explanation, the upshot is a mighty waste of ...”