“... be married to you?!’ Fortunately, a moment of reflection proved that this was not the case. This may turn out to be Philip Roth’s least favourite passage in the book (if and when he reads it), with its proof that Pierpont, however much she admires the humour he sets down on his pages, can’t notate it herself. Nothing more certainly sours a ...”

“... efficiency – as people run to spend their suitcases of banknotes instead of working – and may even wreck the entire financial structure of a society. This being the worst manifestation of the devil, the ultimate Beelzebub, it is not surprising that in 1996, with inflation ultra-low at 1.5 per cent, the Bundesbank, when refusing to cut interest ...”

“... Wyatt’s father is a scholar whose sermons are as likely to mention Mithras as Christ. His Aunt May performs killjoy Puritanism as if it were an Olympic sport: she even hangs up male and female laundry to dry separately. When Reverend Gwyon takes on simple-minded Janet as a kitchen maid, the household is able to match the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm ...”

“... for a short while. Álvaro de Campos was two years younger than Pessoa and slightly taller. He may have been Jewish. He was a dandy who drank absinthe and smoked opium. In an early poem he expressed a desire to ‘eat the universe’, but as he grew older he became more melancholy (‘it would have been better not to be born,/For no matter how interesting ...”

“... today to dismiss the whole book as ‘Chernyaev’s slant’ on the perestroika years. There may be something in that. But then, as slants go, it would be hard to imagine a more vivid and intelligent one. And the big man himself helped. ‘Gorbachev is hard to understand,’ he said to Taubman at the outset. Two reflections can follow those words. One is ...”

“... of the fact that baseball is a tougher sport now than it was in the 1920s, suggests that Bonds may be performing at a higher level in the context of his generation than Ruth did in his. One of the advantages Ruth had was that he played at a time when baseball was a whites-only sport, and so never had to face any of the superb pitchers forced to ply their ...”

“... unspecified stage in the proceedings. In my chambers this is called a ‘scramble’. Although it may evoke heroic images of young men flying off to do battle with the forces of evil, the reality, as I’m sure it was for Battle of Britain pilots, is entirely different. I make my way along the corridor, full of faux-Victorian prints and law reports, to the ...”

“... become a city’s icon – Big Ben, Miss Liberty and the Eiffel Tower date from the 19th – and may well rank with Hagia Sophia and the Taj Mahal as our era’s legacy to the ages. How did an easy-going metropolis, not noted even in Australia for elegance or charm, manage to snare this rare beauty? Come to think of it, where are its successors? Why are most ...”

“... were born and brought up in London, and went to St Paul’s) Robin describes the events of a May night and morning near the plantation where he was assistant manager in Kodanad, high in the mountains in what is now the state of Tamil Nadu. The previous night a leopard had killed a bullock belonging to one of the estate workers (my great-uncle refers to ...”

“... as uneasy bachelors than fathers or husbands. All three, indeed, if this is any of our business, may have died virgins. One of them took the view that ‘I have no ambitions and no desires. To be a poet is not my ambition, it’s my way of being alone.’ The cities in which they were alone were Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Dublin. The writers were Fernando ...”

“... example, the price of the shares being traded is going to rise or fall by several cents), then it may well need to act immediately and aggressively, before other programs do. There’s quite a bit of circulation of staff among HFT firms, and consequently the chief ways of identifying trading opportunities are common knowledge across the firms. How is it that ...”

“... bets they didn’t understand. HBOS was almost entirely a traditional retail bank. ‘Whatever may explain the problems of other banks, the downfall of HBOS was not the result of cultural contamination by investment banking. This was a traditional bank failure pure and simple. It was a case of a bank pursuing traditional banking activities and pursuing ...”

“... come high water. Superstorm Sandy arrived a week before the vote, a natural disaster that may have helped rescue Obama politically by reminding people on the East Coast that a federal government is sometimes a useful thing to have. The advent of postal voting means that the day itself is not quite as special as it once was, but it remains the focus of ...”

“... are not expected to cause long-term harm … If you smell a ‘gas station’ like odour … it may be volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. The key toxic VOCs in most oils are benzene toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene.When I went out on the sea from Grand Isle, which is hardly more than a great sandbar at the end of the watery land south of the city, 109 ...”

“... in the 1930s. Any reflection on the strange career of this form has to begin there, however far it may then wander from him. Built around the work of Walter Scott, Lukács’s theory makes five principal claims. The classical form of the historical novel is an epic depicting a transformation of popular life through a set of representative human types whose ...”