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“... unit labour costs in Germany actually fell – a staggering feat: real wages declined for seven straight years – while they rose some 15 per cent in France and Britain, and between 25 and 35 per cent in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece. With devaluation now barred, the Mediterranean countries are suffering a drastic loss of competitiveness that augurs ...”

“... calls his novel ‘a comedy of manners’ because it treats of people who have been brought up ‘straight’, as it were, and who need a high justification for dirtying their hands. One of the diverting and absorbing features of the book is its fascination with the WASP aesthetic. Not for nothing was OSS, the precursor of the CIA, known during its wartime ...”

“... for his white-heat liking, a men’s club mentality that he never really outgrew. And mostly a straight men’s club at that, if the patronising reference to ‘that nice faggot John Ashbery’ is any indication.) For such an aspirer at such a time, with the entire world engulfed in war, beautiful miniatures – glass menageries – were out of the ...”

“... fuck-off ads in Variety thanking ‘the Industry’ for our nomination. My trajectory seemed as straight and clear as the plane’s flight path on the cabin TV screen. The days of word counts, deadlines, kill fees, dud plays were behind me. From now on I would spend my literary life alternating between writing novels and adapting them for the silver ...”

“... shaky start, it was the deus ex (hit) machina of MTV that was the key, as it was for Madonna and Michael Jackson. People of a certain age will never forget the lush, melodramatic promo for ‘Purple Rain’ and the cheeky, pared-down video for ‘Kiss’.2How did he get away with some of this stuff? Controversy came with a full-colour fold-out poster of ...”

“... contribution by more than half, because the EU gives much of the country’s membership fee straight back. Subsidies to British farmers make up the biggest element of the money that’s returned, at £61 million a week. A more accurate version of the Vote Leave poster would run: ‘Let’s abolish farm subsidies, raise taxes and use all the money we ...”

“... and the irreverent lustre in the eyes a little dulled. And because he seemed to have emerged straight from my childhood, I felt the glow of the early Christmases with Colin and Maureen, the sense of unmanageable happiness at that time of year, like the happiness of a love affair. The first serious swearword I heard, I remembered now, had come from ...”

“... the dock as criminal defendants Mr Crossman’s literary executors – among them his widow and Mr Michael Foot – and the editor of the Sunday Times. An order restraining publication could be issued with so much less inconvenience: by a judge alone, without a jury, and without the machinery of the criminal law. The Lord Chief Justice decided not to stop ...”

“... their eyes back on the pre-reform era, saw little reason to dispute its unsavoury reputation. Even Michael MacDonald, whose splen did Mystical Bedlam used the casebooks of the astrological physician and divine Richard Napier to illuminate the mental world of the 17th century, and to suggest that mental alienation and distress might then have been dealt with in ...”

“... Jack Straw was lamenting that ‘in the last six years, every serious newspaper has abandoned its straight reporting of Parliament.’ Almost overnight, a tradition that dated back to the Victorian era of devoting a page or more every day to coverage of the most important speeches delivered in the House had simply vanished. Much had been hoped from the ...”

“... of extinction. Massive apartment blocks modelled on those of the Soviet Union and hotels straight from the American Midwest are transforming the Syrian capital into an Occidental artefact. Oriental structures, struggling under the weight of satellite receivers large enough for families to sleep in, survive on sufferance. Most stand in a state of near ...”

“... to the curious reader rather than the predatory journalist or academic), he declines to give a straight answer but offers a tantalising clue: since he falls into ‘the dismal category of those who, if they had to act in full awareness of what they were doing, would never act’, he felt ‘the need to be ill-equipped’ in order to write. Because he ...”

“... you could see all the channels the oil and gas industry has cut through the wetlands, creating straight routes through which water can move fast and hard, cutting the channels wider and eroding this coast still further. ‘Nature meanders but time is money,’ a bayou-dweller told me. About a football field of coastline erodes away every 45 minutes, and a ...”

“... filming in Ilkley. Nothing untoward occurred until the evening, when I was taken out to supper by Michael Palin and Maggie Smith. Came my salad of mixed leaves and there, nestling among the rocket, were several shards of broken glass. ‘Very mixed,’ said Miss Smith. ‘No,’ said the waiter. ‘It’s a mistake.’ I reached the 1990s without ...”

“... of Walter Benjamin above all; with European cinema, from Murnau through Leni Riefenstahl to Michael Haneke; with Freud’s Moses and Monotheism; with mid to late Derrida; with Barthes, the decoder of the close-up face in cinema and the figure in the still photograph. She shows us the swaying edifice of Weimar as it goes down, and the horrors that ...”