“... me forget about today until tomorrow’), and was first captured on a tape recording made in May of that year with the folk singer Eric von Schmidt at his home in Sarasota, Florida. Its first live performance was in London, at a Sunday afternoon concert at the Royal Festival Hall on 17 May. (Those were the days, when ...”

“... from the awkward or irrelevant movements that conceal the manipulation of the cards, and it may mildly entertain and astonish you, as such a sleight-of-hand performance may.It’s not as if anyone, even her hardest-core fans, ever makes any claims for Christie as a writer per se. Her prose is flat and functional, her ...”

“... Fichte, gay fiction is considered to be little better than a joke, usually a dirty one; there may or may not be a more pronounced homophobia in Germany than in other European countries, but I suspect the differences are more reasonably attributed to the fortuitous absence of ‘out’ gay novelists of the first ...”

“... road. A map is a memory: it’s a representation, a re-presenting of something that has been. It may look good on paper – and that’s already a fiddle, a projection of a sphere onto a plane – but it’s always a botched job and mapmakers know it. Cartographic language is loaded with confessions of omission and commission: map silences, map fictions, map ...”

“... and 1957. Under de Gaulle, he held portfolios for France’s colonies in Africa and elsewhere. In May 1962, he was appointed to the European Court of Justice.Lecourt came to Luxembourg with a particular set of associations and convictions. Alongside his role as a deputy and minister for the MRP, he had been active since the late 1940s in the Nouvelles ...”

“... for the blandishments of the bankers and borrow disastrously in the Seventies? Part of the answer may be that the country was a democracy, with a functioning Congress that had to approve all loans. I spoke of ‘relatively good management’. By what criteria? It is conservative, consistent, predictable. Its critics say that it is too parochial and too ...”

“... conviction about the problem of individuality, not now in animals so much as in human beings. I may not have heard of Peter Medawar in 1948 but I soon did – in a variety of ways and in a variety of places. My own career as a research scientist quickly faltered: after one year of research at Oxford it was obvious that I lacked that obsessional interest in ...”

“... of the rivers. So now, who can gather the gods on your behalf, Gilgamesh, That you too may find eternal life which you seek? For a start, you must not sleep for six days and seven nights.’ Gilgamesh fails this test, but at the suggestion of Ut-napishtim’s wife he is offered a consolation prize. Ut-napishtim describes a plant which brings ...”

“... and proceeded to turn it into ‘a brothel of shame’ and him into a nervous wreck. Whatever may have been Lukács’s need for self-punishment, expiation and redemption, it was this weird experience, typical of the Dostoevsky-dominated decade of the Great War, which brought him into contact with revolutionary politics. As to the disastrous affair ...”

“... and hear Allan Border, the Australian skipper, sadly reflecting that the low gate that day ‘may have been caused by events elsewhere in the city’. Meanwhile, people – everywhere but especially in Natal – have been getting killed by the hundred. I’m involved in commissioning opinion surveys and find myself having to worry about our interviewers ...”

“... which would sustain the power and wealth of the owners of capital. Workers believed that ‘a man may do as he chooses with his own’ and thus that the capitalist’s right to hire and fire was an expression of the same freedom as their own right to leave one employer and work for another; or they believed that the capitalist’s profits were a just reward ...”

“... or a source of serious knowledge. The new methods of teacher-training instituted in the Sixties may also have helped to make historians uncertain about their subject. Under the PGCE, the graduate qualification required for those taking up posts in secondary schools, teachers were encouraged to think of themselves as ‘educationalists’ rather than ...”

“... on it – which includes trying to describe it, as I have done – draws out meanings which may be latent in it or in the dweller. Wasps and water, cleanness and death, hygiene and poison: no doubt an imaginative system of associations has been insidiously formed. The person who has been thrown off-balance by some traumatic event might feel ...”

“... in these books by the light they shed on public matters? Secret Affairs, the most sordid tale, may seem to have the greatest policy significance. But although the trouble between Welles and Hull sucks in many other foreign policy characters (like William Bullitt, with whom Roosevelt broke over the Welles exposé), it has little political ...”

“... gets bad reviews at a fashion opening and immediately bans the press from all future ones, he may seem to be indulging in a silly fit of pique, but in fact such a move is often a necessary business tactic. Commercial buyers may pledge huge sums in advance of a show, against the clothes they expect to order from it in ...”