“... who think it only goes to show what a bunch of interfering megalomaniac know-nothings editors are may be appeased by rule of thumb no. 6: ‘Good editing can turn a gumbo of a piece into a tolerable example of good reporting . . . Good writing exists beyond the ministrations of any editor . . . A good editor is a mechanic, or craftsman, while a good ...”

“... side. Out you go. I flick the catch and scoop to the real air – lupins tall in the sun, and the may with its dense unruffled shadow. The shelter is almost hidden beyond – an angle of smooth cement, and grass crushed where the steps disappear. We shall finish tonight crouching shy and deformed in our painting clothes, whitewashing walls between bunks and ...”

“... one long, ravished glance That cistern filled with nothing but the truth, Which we partake of but may not possess Unless we go too deep and become lost, By pressure of transparency confounded – Trusting our eyes instead of turning back, Drawn down by clarity into the dark, Crushed by the prospect of enlightenment, Our lungs bursting like a ...”

“... Sun should have latched so gleefully onto the ready-made stories that Big Brother provides. Or it may be that reality TV gets closer to reality than we’d care to acknowledge. If the notion that we have intricate interior lives is an illusion, fostered in part by being exposed at an impressionable age (what age isn’t impressionable?) to too much fiction ...”

“... straight into the boys’ showers’. The complaints from the NUHT, by sterilising the site, may help shore up FriendsReunited’s ethos – just so long as they don’t get it shut down. But if its days are numbered (as schooldays must be), what conclusion to the nostalgia trip could be more fitting, what final gesture more authentic, than the head ...”

“... Sea’: The Red Sea begins and ends. And then there’s an area Just beyond the Red Sea, And it may very well be That people choose to do it Before they get in the Red Sea Or after they’re in there – Possibly, probably, certainly. In ‘Doing the Capable’, Rumsfeld says: The United States isn’t going to do anything That it’s not capable of ...”

“... including ‘Messerschmitt’, ‘Jesuit’ and ‘lickety-split’, and none of them obscene – may have been, he certainly erred in misquoting Thomas Edison (no rhymes), who suggested the ratio was 1 to 99, as we are reliably reminded in Science Says: A Collection of Quotations on the History, Meaning and Practice of Science, edited by Rob Kaplan ...”

“... at either end of the day, is the one modern photographers of buildings and landscapes wait for. It may be rare, and more common in the South than the North, but you can experience it once in a while at almost any latitude between the Mediterranean and the Arctic Circle. What had at first to be seen through the eyes of Claude was, in effect, waiting to be ...”

“... chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was a mate of Alastair Campbell’s. Lord Hutton may not have found this significant, but I do. MI6 has long experience in the dissemination of forged documents to make a political case. In 1924, two MI6 officers leaked a forged letter, purportedly from Zinoviev, the president of the Comintern, to the central ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Iago as her dog-faced seducer, the embittered servant De Flores. Thus the unsentimental Middleton may well have a better claim to be regarded as Shakespeare’s heir than his official successor as principal dramatist for the King’s Men, John Fletcher, the sentimental doyen of romantic tragicomedy. After Marlowe, Middleton had perhaps the most arrestingly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”