“... came to national attention when he gave the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston. He was a state senator at the time in Illinois and running for national office. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, a singularly drab and prevaricating man, had been much taken by Obama after appearing on stage with him in Chicago. Many ...”

“... It is a collection of case-material, narrated as the experiences of a fictionalised doctor in Boston. It portrays the pressures for overtreatment as manifesting themselves, not in any direct perception that that is where doctors’ interests lie, but in an attempt to deny the uncertainty that inevitably attends any treatment, and a consequent fear of ...”

“... have felt was a dead end: sexual explicitness in writing for its own sake. When Whitman visited Boston, Emerson advised him to cut out the inflammatory bits, which would make Leaves ‘not as good a book but a good book’. Whitman listened respectfully to the sympathetic old Brahmin, but felt the price was too high. ‘If I had cut sex out,’ he mused ...”

“... about its deliberate obscurity. It is the equivalent of shutting a door in its reader’s face. As Richard Sewall, her biographer, noted, ‘She enjoyed riddles, apparently enjoyed being one.’ But was she a riddle that wanted to be solved? Did she want readerly guests? Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries and Lyndall Gordon’s Lives ...”

“... the favourites: Even more than the better-known The Forest Lovers I loved The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay, about King Richard the Lion-Hearted, published in 1900 ... the medieval romances I was writing at top speed on an empty stomach were meant to be in his manner. I cannot remember whether I showed any of them ...”

“... country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country’ – but the exposed whoppers of Richard ‘I am not a crook’ Nixon, George ‘Read my lips: no new taxes’ Bush, and Bill ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman’ Clinton. David Schippers, the majority counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, hammered home the point in the ...”

“... and raped, usually without the culprit being brought to justice. Some fared better than others: Richard Ligon, a royalist fugitive to Barbados, observed that much depended on the master. Tender-hearted men gave servants work ‘as is not unfit for Christians to do’; but the cruel ones made their lives ‘very wearisome and miserable’.More than a few ...”

“... Yet Piano burst into public view with the Centre Pompidou (1971-77), which, designed with Richard Rogers, is the most celebrated of the high-tech megastructures of the period, and today he is also associated with large urban schemes, including the redevelopment of the old harbour in Genoa (1985-92) and Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (1992-2000), as well as ...”

“... is on a different scale from the East. With Lucia Berlin we are very far away from the parlours of Boston and New York and quite far away, too, from the fiction of manners, unless we are speaking of very bad manners. Landscape rules in the West. The individual is diminished or obliterated, along with his personality and will: It was cool and smelled like ...”

“... and a confidence in the magical properties of numbers. It was from such an ideological bank that Richard Brothers borrowed the notion that he was destined to lead the Jews back to the Holy Land (sorting out the Jews is often a precondition of the millennium) and to rebuild the city and the Temple. He made very elaborate specifications for the first of these ...”

“... Nabisco box factory transformed into an ensemble of vast halls to encompass gigantic sculptures by Richard Serra and others. The second road to expansion was more direct: the building from scratch of new museums as vast containers for huge artwork, as exemplified by Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. In some respects this bigness is the outcome of a space race ...”

“... he spent making The Godfather or The Godfather Part II but the four years he spent on Looking for Richard, a 1996 passion project about Shakespeare that he financed himself. If you haven’t seen it – and you should – Looking for Richard is a hybrid movie assembled with the help of Frederic Kimball, an actor and writer ...”

“... Unmodern Observations by different hands, under the editorship of Professor William Arrowsmith of Boston University. The first of them, a satirical attack on The Old Faith and the New, a work of David Strauss’s dotage (1871, English translation 1873), begins with a memorable disclaimer. The German public’s eagerness to infer from the military victory over ...”

“... papers concerning Kennedy’s health problems, which were held at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. Earlier books had revealed that Kennedy took a number of different medications, and we were vaguely aware at the time that he had a bad back, but Dallek’s new information about the extent of Kennedy’s health problems is astonishing. He does not treat ...”

“... in Scotland and the north-east of England. Tax was being illegally avoided by smuggling tea into Boston, Lincolnshire, many years before legally taxed tea was dumped into the harbour of Boston, Massachusetts. A lot of the smuggled tea made its way to London, huge profits being made if the contraband could be laundered as ...”