“... turns out to be the real name of the Falling Man. Janiak hurt his back in one of the falls, he may or may not have been suicidal (he claimed his last jump would be without a harness, or was that just an artist’s self-promotion?) and he dies in the end of unrelated natural causes (a heart condition) somewhere near ...”

“... it the wealthiest club in the world, or at least the club with the wealthiest backers, which may not be the same thing. None of these teams has needed to move to follow the money. Instead, the money has come to them. What these new owners seem to want from English football is a stake in a glamorous and dynamic business with vast global appeal. This means ...”

“... instinctive authoritarian who seems to have no conception at all of the importance of liberty. It may be that Blunkett’s blindness had some bearing on this. He is a man who is intensely disciplined, but who has little experience of liberty; perhaps one could simply say that he has no feeling for it. He has overcome so many difficulties through willpower ...”

“... necessary. The poor bloody infantry also deserves recognition and historical commemoration. This may seem a back-handed way of paying tribute to the work of George Peden, whose iron-clad research in the public records has established him as the leading authority on the 20th-century Treasury, which long served as the butt of much of Keynes’s criticism of ...”

“... afterward. They shall know well the heavenly fellowship Of men that perish and of summer morn. It may seem ‘far-fetched’, Sharpe acknowledges, to connect the ‘casual flocks of pigeons’ that close the poem with the demise of a particular species, but he points out that ‘Sunday Morning’ was composed not long after the death of the last passenger ...”

“... your cast-offs has become a form of research, and, if you have shopped wisely, your archive may deserve an exhibition of its own. A professor of drama at Columbia has just donated 193 pieces to the Perry Ellis archive at the Fashion Institute of Technology. ‘Traditionally most designers did not think of archiving their careers,’ Valerie Steele, the ...”

“... lost, and the reasons for its getting lost are part of the film. Introducing the film at Cannes in May 1979, Coppola said it wasn’t about Vietnam: it was Vietnam. By Vietnam he didn’t mean the country in South-East Asia, he meant what ‘Vietnam’ nearly always means in post-1970s American English: the historical moment when Americans met themselves in a ...”

“... the Armenians of Van rose in self-defence, and held on till a Russian advance reached them in May. Four days later, as British forces were about to land at Gallipoli, Armenian deputies and former ministers were arrested. In Anatolia, the killings and deportations spread, supposedly to clear sensitive combat zones of potential fifth-columnists. Reports of ...”

“... a woman not a man. Jane Williams had shared those last months in Italy and, whatever Mary Shelley may have felt at the time about her husband’s attentions to this attractive musician to whom he addressed some of the most yearningly exquisite of his late lyrics, once back in England she herself became ‘excessively’, as she admitted, attached to her. Jane ...”

“... The scientists are frustrated. What began as ‘Why won’t they trust us when we know best?’ may have shifted to ‘If only they understood, they would trust us,’ but the underlying resentment is the same: irrational, unnecessary ignorance, encouraged by nefarious, myth-spreading activists, is to blame for the anti-GM movement. The resentment isn’t ...”

“... Dinosaur meets the Commission for Racial Equality,’ the Times snorted. ‘Whatever Britishness may be, it is surely not the mush that is now being proposed.’ All that one can say is that the mush spoken about Britishness matches the mush thought about Britishness by the inhabitants of this archipelago. In the British Social Attitudes survey, researchers ...”

“... idea that a place or community might actually speak through the poet, or co-produce the poetry, may be a primitive one going back to a time when poet and place might be inseparable – was the Delphic Oracle a poet or a place? Some diggers-in emblematise that act to such an extent that their lives as well as their poetry and their place acquire an ...”

“... by the Franks in 798, though another contemporary annalist puts the figure at 2901. But warfare may not be the appropriate context in which to assess the plausibility of the figure 4500. The massacre at Verden has to be understood as a political event. It would be better perhaps to compare the victims not to battlefield casualties but to hostages or ...”

“... is difficult. ‘No one can ever be himself in this land,’ says the shadowy figure who may or may not be responsible for the double murder that closes The Black Book (Kara Kitap, 1990; translated in 1994). ‘In the land of the defeated and oppressed, to be is to be someone else. I am someone else; therefore I ...”

“... always enact the opposite of the laws they so like to propose. Mrs Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice, may be the funniest example. ‘I do not like to boast of my child,’ she announces, while doing so; or ‘People who suffer as I do from nervous complaints can have no great inclination for talking.’ In the same book Mr Collins is always prefacing his little ...”