“... and a postmortem arranged.Nine hours earlier, Merope and I had been in the ambulance that sped north through the city to GOSH. I held Martha’s head in my hands; her eyes were taped shut, her body was swollen and discoloured. Now we took a taxi back to King’s to pick up possessions from her cubicle on Rays of Sunshine ward – presents she’d been ...”

“... work on Northern Ireland. It is certainly not lacking in nerve: MacDonald is ready to assert that Paul Bew, the most challenging of modern Ulster-bred historians, ‘cannot appreciate – still less explain – the genuine perversity of Northern Ireland’. But the most serious weakness of this book lies in its failure to engage with its own subtitle. Even if ...”

“... broader American minds, and getting himself posted to the Eisenhower-Macmillan joint command in North Africa. He also developed, according to Howard, a marked preference for the active-service officer over ‘the trained diplomats or elected politicians with whom he had been accustomed to deal in London’. After the war, though sharing much of the general ...”

“... credit to him for doing so, so soon after such a terrible moment in his career – he brought Paul Gascoigne along with him. This three-way exchange is a scoop for Davies, not least because of Gascoigne’s otherwise intractable hostility to the press: a few months before, Davies had interviewed Chris Waddle while Gascoigne sat beside them, throwing ...”

“... Ellis, a Roman Catholic novelist, was brought up in Penmaenmawr, between Conwy and Bangor on the North Wales coast, facing the island of Anglesey. In one of her moods, she is inclined towards elegy for the ruined stone cottages and commination for all ‘housing developments’. She requires some great authority to forbid change in her childhood ...”

“... of his intense negotiations with Russia and China in the early Seventies – the isolation of North Vietnam – failed to work out, when Hanoi reunited the country by force of arms in 1975. In Europe, his interventions were misguided: he remained long suspicious of the Ostpolitik of Brandt and failed to see how the situation on the continent was ...”

“... stool-pit’) in the course of one of the book’s best set-pieces. Lecter is flying back to North America, having narrowly escaped capture in Florence at the hands of Verger’s henchmen. He is flying in tourist class, disguised as a member of Old World Fantasy, a Canadian tour party which has just visited 11 European countries in 17 days. ‘Shoulder ...”

“... by treating people like Drayson and Bellhouse as heroes for creating wealth from knowledge’ – Paul Drayson and Brian Bellhouse are both medical inventors – ‘that Britain will develop a fully fledged entrepreneurial culture,’ Leadbeater puffs, as if Thatcherism had never happened, and Britain was not a country so infused with the corporate spirit ...”

“... sociologists have had reason to ask. On the one hand are those, including the whole of mainstream North American sociology, who go on about their research – using statistics and causal talk, scientificating by validation and the accumulation of findings – who seldom notice that they have been castigated as positivists, and who remember Durkheim as someone ...”

“... not pathetic; virtuel, potential, not virtual; délire, delusion, not delirium; pays nordiques, north European, not nordic, countries; emphase, exaggeration, bombast, not emphasis; primaire, simplistic, not primary; ponctuel, specific not punctual). And what are Jean Paul II (St Peter’s successor) and the ‘Palais ...”

“... Academy was a grudging discretion. Ten years was deemed a decent enough interval in the case of Paul Morand, for example, whose ‘role during the last war’ led to the defeat of his candidacy in 1958: in 1968 he was duly elected to the Academy. The Academy’s refusal of all attempts at reform and renewal has not done it much good: today it is seen by ...”

“... Historicism and Cultural Materialism are enterprises which, as products of our Western European or North American presuppositions, prove to be as blindly culture-specific as the societies they describe.’ He is rightly cheerful about this prospect of his own occultation; it is a fate which, like death, he will share with us all. But he hopes that, unlike most ...”

“... been an issue for the church. Total ostracism was the usual response, accompanied by florid, North Korea-style demonisation. The four uncles and aunts who had chosen not to spend their lives being vile for the Lord were ‘criminally rebellious’, ‘vain and whorish’, ‘an idolatrous witch’, ‘an entitled manipulator’. In 2004 Megan’s beloved ...”

“... Each had a unique character. Still, there was a pattern of increasing violence. Zhytomyr, in north-west Ukraine, saw two pogroms in the space of two months; the town had sustained a brief period of Bolshevik occupation, and local opinion identified Jews – sometimes correctly – with the brutality of the Cheka. But the inhabitants of Zhytomyr conflated ...”

“... the freedom of the press, stating baldly: ‘There is no censorship.’ From left to right, Paul Sethe, Marion Dönhoff, Hans Zehrer. By the mid-1920s Germany had more than four thousand daily or weekly newspapers and another three thousand more specialised periodicals. Every town and city had its own papers, and some of them, such as the Frankfurter ...”