“... comparable writer. She liked to imagine the nuclear family as radically estranged from itself – by the death of a parent or a child, by childlessness, by emergency or neglect. Twenty-year-old Roderick Rodney in The Heat of the Day (1948) ‘would have esteemed, for instance, organic ...”

“... José Mourinho. Before Real Madrid lost 1-0 at home to Sporting Gijón on 2 April, no team managed by Mourinho had lost a home league game for more than nine years, a sequence spanning four different clubs in four different countries (Mourinho has also managed Porto, Chelsea and Inter Milan) and lasting 150 matches. It is true that Porto, Chelsea, Inter and ...”

“... as they open the door of a booth to make some life or death call is the stickiness left behind by a previous user. Expecting to speak and to listen, they instead inhale the anonymous yet fiercely intimate odour of the crowd. The protagonist of Howard Simpson’s Vietnam spy novel, Someone Else’s War (2003), has information to gather. He makes a ...”

“... notwithstanding the fact they spent most of his tenure in the White House trying to destroy him by fair means or foul, mainly foul. ‘Good ol’ Jesse,’ is all Clinton will say of the poisonous, racist Jesse Helms, who has just called him ‘unfit’ to lead the armed forces and warned him to stay away from North Carolina for his own safety. The ...”

“... president. It’s important to spell out what his disability entailed. Roosevelt was stricken by polio in 1921 and never recovered the use of his legs. Every day he had to be dressed and undressed, helped onto the toilet and heaved into bed. ‘Rubberlegs’ – the nickname he was given ...”

“... that an understanding was reached whereby Bush made it clear that he was going to disarm Saddam by force come what may, and Blair made it clear that, come what may, he would help him. If so, then there is also a strong suspicion that Blair, like Anthony Eden in late 1956, misled Parliament and the public over the nature of the undertaking on which he was ...”

“... you look for these books in bookshops (itself rather a quaint idea given that you’re supposed to be buying them online), you’ll discover them in the business or management sections, where their lessons about openness, flexibility, innovation and the importance of listening to what your customers are telling you have their most immediate applications. But ...”

“... The best one-volume encyclopedia in the world used to be the Columbia Encyclopedia, first published by Columbia University Press in 1935. In our house we have the fifth edition, from 1993, and we still get it out occasionally to look up kings and queens and old-fashioned stuff like that ...”

“... exemption from everyday rough-and-tumble renders them particularly susceptible to humiliation by pratfall and in the sense that their vast wealth has by this account equipped them – contrary to popular prejudice – with an unquenchable desire to help out those less fortunate than themselves. Sturges certainly ...”

“... his conception of philosophy and too soon to see clearly what the influence of his thought would be. Just as French philosophy was once divided between Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, it recently seemed to be going in two different directions, one exemplified by Foucault and the other ...”

“... those who judge him a competent if somewhat pedestrian professional soldier who usually managed by good fortune to decline battle unless the odds were overwhelmingly in his favour, a general apt to forfeit the fruits of victory by excessive caution; an unimaginative commander with a very inflated view of his own talents ...”

“... as winners. These analogies are intended to capture the scale of the challenge – it’s going to be a major effort – while keeping alive the thought that we can succeed. The problem is that climate change is nothing like anything we’ve encountered before. Just because we did all those things doesn’t mean we can do this one. So what about a different ...”

“... the 1938 congressional midterms was barely 35,000. This remarkably limited franchise was achieved by means of elaborate rules – including a poll tax – designed to make voting both difficult and expensive; it was backed up by threats of violence to anyone who challenged the status quo. The aim, of course, was to make ...”

“... If he is going to take up roasting legs of lamb at this stage of his life, then what else might be possible?’ Christopher, it seems, no longer makes Peter angry. He just makes him a little sad. What he is sad about is Christopher’s inability to see that his militant atheism is just an extension of his earlier Trotskyism. Christopher, Peter thinks, is ...”

“... Hypocrisy is such a ubiquitous feature of democratic politics that it can be hard to take it seriously. Indeed, taking it seriously is sometimes held to be a sign of political immaturity, or worse still, just more hypocrisy. We know that politicians can’t possibly sustain all the absurd contortions we demand of them as the price for securing our votes ...”