“... Anatomy of Bibliomania, a comprehensive treatment of obsessive book-buying in the manner of Robert Burton; and sometimes even a copy of Carter and Pollard’s Inquiry into the Nature of Certain 19th-Century Pamphlets, the exposé that dished Thomas J. Wise, forger of rare editions. It all seemed to contradict the rants of intellectuals about the ...”

“... fucked in 46 of the 50 states. I wish I’d known this in 1952, when in my first weeks of National Service Basic Training I was in the next bed to a boy called Huggins, a steelworker from Sheffield whose frequent boast was that he had ‘had his hole’ in six or seven towns and cities, which he would then list. At the time I was less than impressed and ...”

“... Lord Chief Justices. The memory is not a warm one. This whole question of extra-curricular public service by judges – in public inquiries, commissions and so on – is one that has not been properly explored. Increasingly in recent years, judges have been asked to perform all manner of public duties way beyond the confines of the courtroom, sometimes ...”

“... is Rachel, maid to Ermelinda Tuzzi who is the wife of Section Chief Tuzzi, a bureaucrat in the service of the Imperial Austrian Government in Vienna. The year is 1913: Rachel was 19 and believed in miracles. She had been born in a squalid shack in Poland, where a mezuzah hung on the doorpost and the soil came up through the cracks in the floorboards. She ...”

“... and on his return to Budapest he used his father’s influence to secure exemption from military service, though he worked briefly in the government censorship. By 1917 Lukács’s friends had formed an ideological nucleus in the form of a ‘Free School of the Humanities’, but his actual conversion to Communism only took place in December 1918, in ...”

“... a cult which Anglicanism bravely struggles to co-opt at the next morning’s annual Shakespeare Service. During this unusual ceremony stars from the RSC will perform the Bible readings, and a specially commissioned theologian will attempt to prove that the Complete Works are really all about the glory of God (having reminded the congregation that the ...”

“... the glass misted up in front of her mouth. I walked on a few blocks. There was a midnight service going on at St Patrick’s Cathedral. A long queue stretched all the way down to the altar, where a glass case stood by itself, with a casket inside, containing the relics of St Theresa of Lisieux. A hundred years ago the Carmelite nun Thérèse Martin ...”

“... it sees the prose as a compound of bile and braggadocio – obstructive showing-off in the service of a complacent snobbery. One similarity between these two views, which is generally unrecognised or unacknowledged, is their assumption that there is something artificial or dead at the heart of Arnold’s prose, something which indicates a kind of ...”

“... to inform you,’ it said, ‘that your husband Michael O’Hagan is reported missing on war service.’ Others had known of the ship’s sinking before then, and word had spread, but no one could face telling Molly or any of the women who had men on the boats. They left her pretty much alone with the telegram that day, but gathered round the day ...”

“... book. Boswell was always grateful for a leg-up to the moral high ground, so here is another little service ‘honest Francis’ has done him. Barber was noticed by his eminent contemporaries, his life brushes against theirs, and yet there is a missing dimension in their descriptions of him. They wish him good day as they hand him their coats and their walking ...”

“... non-nuclear states from acquiring nuclear weapons, but the existing powers had only paid lip service to disarmament. Now the US could focus on non-proliferation as a tool of power politics. It often failed. The Clinton administration sought to prevent North Korea getting the bomb, and with the 1994 Agreed Framework succeeded in temporarily hindering its ...”

“... In the autumn of 1358, another ‘Great Company’ of English and Breton routiers under Robert Knolles invaded the rich Loire provinces, moving on into the Nivernais and the Auxerrois. ‘They brought the whole of the region under their control, ordering every village great or small to ransom itself and buy back the bodies, goods and stores of every ...”

“... Journalists paid between £250 and £5000 a time to police officers, prison guards, health service workers, civil servants and other public officials in return for tip-offs, copies of records and photographs taken in the course of their duties. At least a dozen officers from four different police forces were taking bribes, including two in the ...”

“... leaders of Ethiopia and has even contemplated improving its relations with Sudan’s intelligence service. For decades, Western leaders have paid attention to Africa only when it suffered miseries that trickled onto CNN and the BBC, and Western expatriates have descended on Africa armed with PowerPoint presentations, Land Rovers, business class tickets on ...”

“... shooting, revenge for a killing he instigated, something connected with the Iranian secret service, or simply an attack by one of the two main groups which I know oppose him. ‘Perhaps,’ he concedes, ‘it is because of my criticism of the corruption.’ The Coalition gave $2 million directly to the provincial council to spend on local ...”