“... about as a child, it has nothing much to do with having lived for 50 years or more. It is, as Richard Shweder and the other anthropologists insist in the coyly named collection of ethnographical essays Welcome to Middle Age!, a ‘cultural fiction’.* Faced with the label, I find it hard not to wonder what use such a designation could be. Presumably ...”

“... and guidelines that determine what research is approved. Thanks to the clinical ethics movement, white-coated bioethicists work in hospitals and medical schools – advising doctors and nurses, writing notes on patients’ charts. Bioethicists serve as consultants to managed care organisations, advisers to non-profit medical foundations, and expert witnesses ...”

“... played by Malcolm McDowell, passing the vodka to his friends, Johnny and Wallace (David Wood and Richard Warwick), asks: ‘When do we live? That’s what I want to know.’ Elsewhere in the film, when the three of them are fencing together, playing at fighting, Travis gets cut on the hand, and is fascinated by his own blood. ‘Look,’ he says: ‘real ...”

“... toasted ‘trial by British jury’. Whether Pitt’s Government sought to initiate a reign of ‘white terror’, as E.P. Thompson suggested, remains a matter of speculation. In his third section, ‘Alarms and Diversions’, Barrell produces two fine chapters on the ‘popgun’ plot and the strange case of ...”

“... reading Tyndale, Coverdale, Milton, Sidney, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Francis Bacon, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw and the inspired committee-work of the Authorised Version – one immediately notices that the biblical texts are really quite vile, and that the poets’ ‘personal agendas’ seem almost without exception bizarre, baffling or psychotic. In ...”

“... past their limits as artists or actors or technicians, and made them propel their material, Richard Condon’s cheaply paranoid fantasy, past its limits.’ And part of the answer is to do with the power of that fantasy, the way in which The Manchurian Candidate links into the enduring pattern of paranoid politics in America. Despite its talk of ...”

“... a quotation labouring to attain a modicum of reality. Not so much a dry David Hockney splash as Richard Wilson’s site-specific installation 20:50: his tank of sump oil, miraculously transubstantiated into this brilliant new substance, a liquid thicker than jelly but lighter than air. A seductive mosaic carpet across which you cannot walk without ...”

“... the wrong people in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Guardian’s defence correspondent, Richard Norton-Taylor, sends me an email from London which he received from Simon Wren, an MoD press officer. Wren is ranting about my colleagues’ earlier reports on how soldiers haven’t got enough toilet paper, aren’t getting decent food and haven’t got ...”

“... feelings, the choice at the time was almost non-existent. Smith was a tiny echo from the future. White shirt, dark hair; white background, dark eyes; tiny white equine jewel, dark tie; hands in a cagy gunfighter’s arch over her wide-open heart: this hauntingly simple image anticipated ...”

“... rebounded and remained intact: I got hit and saw stars – for the first time – blinding red & white stars exploding in the black void of snarls & bitings. Air cleared. We are intact. She goes on to describe a walk she took with Ted later in the day: The evening was dim, light grey with wet humid mist, swimming green. I took a pair of silver-plated ...”

“... an afterlife that, for some time, has been a matter of common knowledge: a moment’s fear, then a white light from which some beneficent doorman out of central casting steps forward to welcome the newly departed. This anteroom of the world to come is taken for granted by millions, including possibly the same 86 per cent of Americans who told the Larry King ...”

“... the air and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama – “when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”’ The complaints focus on what Washington did not have: any advance warning from the assumed source of the attack. The military intelligence community has for years produced a highly classified early ...”

“... grey stripes; a 25-cent belt stays in them always. A freshly laundered and brilliantly starched white shirt with narrow black stripes. A brown, green and gold tie in broad stripes, of stiff and hard imitation watered silk. The particulars neither solicit nor receive celebration, and the end is a return: ‘The crease is still sharp in the ...”

“... for example, in a speech which Paisley made in 1973, the year the House of Commons approved a White Paper for a Northern Ireland Assembly. During the Commons debate, Paisley said this: In many senses we have been caught up in a struggle that goes far beyond the basic differences between two sections of the community. There are other elements in the ...”

“... steam prising its way under collars and cuffs, hot like it was in the summer of 1949 when E.B. White holed himself up in a hotel without air-conditioning to sweat out the paragraphs of his book, Here Is New York. White began scanning the skies in the hope of raindrops, but all he saw was endless blue, and he began to ...”