“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he complained that the UK’s broadcast media had a left-wing bias. Two weeks later he installed Michael Gove, an old ally, as editor.Marshall, whose fortune is estimated at £875 million, is also Britain’s biggest philanthropist. He has ploughed hundreds of millions of pounds into schools, universities and churches. In recent months I have spoken to more ...”

“... forgetting the medium – that ‘it’s a privilege to watch.’ ‘Thank you, Ocean Vuong,’ Michael Cunningham chimes, ‘for this brilliant and remarkable first novel.’ Ben Lerner goes big: ‘Vuong … expands our sense of what literature can make visible, thinkable, felt across borders and generations and genres.’ He must have thought this would ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... wrote after DiMaggio’s death in 1999, he bluntly declared: ‘No one should ever have hit in 56 straight games.’ What DiMaggio achieved, therefore, ‘ranks as pure heart, not the rare expectation of luck’. But this is, to say the least, an odd way of putting it. What the data reveal is that DiMaggio’s streak was much more unlikely than other unlikely ...”

“... skin. We sat on a wooden bench in the rain, a green bottle of sherry sat between us. George stared straight ahead most of the time, tilting the bottle up to his mouth with both hands, getting it into position, holding it there, and breathing through his nose. I tried to roll him a cigarette inside my jacket while he spoke of Newcastle, of how he thought he’d ...”

“... no more than her slightly quivering shoulders and hand raised to her mouth. Mr Entwistle, ramrod-straight in a Sunday suit, looked more like a figure from the 1950s than from the 21st century, one of those withdrawn and stoical breadwinners who haunt period TV drama. He conjured the lace-curtain world of appearances kept up, stiff collars, the vegetable plot ...”

“... They dig​ and the earth is sweet. The Hackney Hole is eight square metres, straight down through the lawn of a decommissioned rectory. This secret garden is separated from St Augustine’s Tower by a high wall of darkly weathered brick. The proud stub of the square tower is all that remains of Hackney’s oldest ecclesiastical building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John ...”

“... Center, mainly old), black or white (in the Lincoln Center, almost exclusively white), gay or straight (in the Lincoln Center it is often hard to tell). The audience for James Baldwin that evening could not be so easily categorised: it was, I suppose, half black, half white; half young, half old; three-quarters ...”