“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Protestant family in Scranton, a declining coal-mining town in Pennsylvania. She didn’t go straight to university, but moved instead to New York with her sister, Betty, and managed with impressive speed to carve out a career as a copywriter and freelance journalist – at first she got most of her commissions from a metallurgy trade journal, Iron ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... projections depict a better than real vision of uniform crescents inspired by Bath, and long straight avenues out of Haussmann, all wrapped in a green buffer of newly planted woodland with a strip of river frontage ‘accessible for walks and cycling as well as bird and seal watching’.This is good news for ex-industrial settlements struggling with debt ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... three gables, two of them hipped, an eyebrow dormer like a lewd wink, thick thatch, an absence of straight lines and orthodox geometry, leaded lights and a quite exceptional abundance of ersatz beams and chimneys. Its improbable neighbour was Robert van ’t Hoff, a member of De Stijl and author of Lloyd Wright inspired villas near Utrecht, of Augustus ...”

“... of the Tuileries garden without anyone daring to stop him’.One of Malcolm’s touchstones is Michael Rocke’s Forbidden Friendships (1996), a study of Florence’s Office of the Night, which operated from 1432 until 1502. Over its seventy years, the anti-sodomy magistracy investigated as many as sixteen thousand men – among them Leonardo da Vinci ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”