“... desert, violet and dun, to the biblical meadows, the pretty colours and the plenty that will be California. The art direction of that great trek westwards was perfect – art direction usually is. And now here comes Joan Didion, a little bit like the doomsayer on the wagon train (Walter Brennan, with teeth), but too arresting to ...”

“... bomb – were to become an almost public constituent of his writing life. His criticism is marked by the same mixture of yearning and disappointed hopes. Agee’s special province as a movie reviewer was the perception of purpose – the honourable failure is a frequent subject with him, more congenial than the rare masterwork or the latest specimen of ...”

“... The final insult came when a New York journalist started a rumour that Maris’s record would not be allowed to stand, because in 1961 the baseball season had been expanded from 154 to 162 games, meaning Maris had had an extra eight games to get past Ruth. Word got out that Maris’s 61 would be followed in the record books ...”

“... of living up to his good intentions: Putting Iraq to rights, in Mr Blair’s view, should be the whole world’s business. The more that all nations make common cause to do this, the better. The less this happens, the more vital it is to balance any absence of common cause with a sense of equitable and humanitarian initiatives – on the Middle East ...”

“... images are duly laid out for public consumption on the nightly news, but the public is jaded by too many images of a suffering world. Then some bright spark in one of the better-funded NGOs offers individuals the chance to ‘adopt’ particular children or families in the refugee camps, and to keep an eye on their progress through a direct video-link to ...”

“... only possible because earlier generations tended to have multiple offspring. Once that ceases to be true, family trees start to look the same from both directions. That has never happened before and it is hard to know what it will mean. But it is going to feel oppressive.What can make depopulation difficult to fathom is the different timescales on which it ...”

“... Lyndon Johnson always believed he would be president. As a boy in Texas, growing up in poor and sometimes desperate circumstances, he told anyone who would listen that he was headed for the White House. He mapped out a plan to get there from which, as Robert Caro writes, ‘he refused to be diverted ...”

“... throw these into the hamper.’ ‘You always throw them on the floor.’ ‘I’ve decided to be more neat. Every night before going to bed, from now on, I’ll throw my dirty things into the hamper. Why’re you frowning?’ he asked. ‘I’m doing it for you, so you won’t have to do it in the morning. I thought you’d ...”

“... was the original name, but one may as well call him Groucho, from the ‘grouch bag’ carried by travelling showmen. His parents were Jewish immigrants: Simon Marrix, of a family of tailors from Alsace-Lorraine, and Minna Schoenberg, the daughter of a Dutch magician who emigrated when his work in Germany ran out in the 1870s. All of the Marxes appear to ...”

“... to write a book about it. Her life had the privilege of privacy, and no doubt seemed destined to be dominated by house-hunting, jokes about the mortgage rates, and holidays in Tuscany, where her mother had a summer house. Despite having been a regular druguser, she remarks in her prologue: ‘If someone had told me that I ...”

“... for Aston Villa, but now he’s thinking of taking acting lessons. Perhaps he had been inspired by the careers of Jimmy Boyle, John McVicar, ‘Dirty Den’ of EastEnders, and Paul Barber, one of the ‘Brothers McGregor’ who also spent some time inside, and who recently claimed in the Sun: ‘Jailed turned me into a ...”

“... books for drawings and paintings – and commissioned photographs. Some of the most powerful were by David King. He used to come blazing into the office with his huge black-and-white portraits, already measured up for size: no question, ever, of anything being cropped. One was of the writer Francis Wyndham, then in his sixties, in conversation with a ...”

“... countries the worst hit. When people in those countries tried to diminish the threat of the virus by comparing it to the flu, the disease made a joke of them. But air pollution kills more than ten times as many as the flu every single year, and we hear even less about it. In 2017, a Lancet study put the figure at almost seven million a year, about two-thirds ...”

“... In memoriam D.C. BermanSo he could be less pained, perusing his library of fleasas his antique gaze brushes everyone in the audience once – even you – placid, bland,then on to some untelegraphed point without,the jungle glow: a tremolo arm bent lagoonwards.His fingers, thick as bottlenecks,crowfooted like sofa leather,pinch fur, know bough and scruffbut never ash or maple, fretted and strung, never a rope ...”

“... David Peterley’s Peterley Harvest was first published on 24 October 1960. The book had a curious history and, shortly before publication, stories began to appear in the press declaring it to be an elaborate hoax. The jacket of the book contained the information that David Peterley was the only son of an old Quaker family that had ‘lived in the Chilterns and been neighbours of Milton and the Penns ...”