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“... was inspired by the idea that ‘reality is a thing that has to be reinvented continually.’ With no family to confine him, he used school holidays to venture out. A ‘seasoned hitch-hiker’ by the age of 16, he visited the far west of England and the Welsh Marches, as well as Scotland: he cycled through the Highlands in 1935 and, a year later, attended a ...”

“... my education proper was finished. December 1951 was sunny but bitterly cold and though there was no snow the Cam was frozen and the lawns and quadrangles white with frost; coming to it from the soot and grime of the West Riding I thought I had never seen or imagined a place of such beauty. And even today the only place that has enchanted me as much as ...”

“... was a tough-minded drive to find mechanical explanations. When England’s greatest living poet, John Milton, wanted to explain why we are as we are, he retold the ancient story of Adam’s sin and consequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden. When Alexander Pope wrote his Essay on Man in the following century he took care to parallel his work with ...”

“... one does: ‘When I was in graduate school I was startled to find this story’s source in The John Collier Reader, – or so I have always believed until this afternoon, when I first riffled, then paged carefully, front to back, back to front, through the local copy (Knopf, 1972) and discovered no trace of such a story ...”

“... Queen’ for ‘Oliver’s Army’. Abba seemed to hark back to the early days of rock’n’roll, capturing its bubblegum paradox of disposability and durability, its youthful immediacy if not its charged libido. They steered clear of 1970s excess, indulging in neither progressive pomp nor sidelong voyaging.Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid ...”

“... of his enterprise is hard to take in. So is its novelty. Londoners, especially the poorest, were no strangers to scrutiny from charitable and religious reformers or campaigning journalists. But Booth was the first to organise a research team and to look at the whole city from a number of different perspectives, to seek out facts and use the new methods of ...”

“... passing through his chest hit a lung and the heart, causing massive internal bleeding. He had no chance of survival. Captain Andrew Cox dispatched a helicopter to pick up the injured man and bring him back to base. The helicopter carried him to camp Abu Naji where he was ventilated, but his pupils became fixed and at 00.50 hrs on 2 May 2005, surrounded by ...”

“... in Dublin asking if it was ‘possible for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of No. 7 Eccles Street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 off the ground and drop unhurt. I saw it done myself but by a man of rather athletic build.’Joyce’s friend ...”

“... of every sort. A bit much, one is tempted to say, perhaps even a bit crazy. Some of this activity, no doubt, is merely an occasion for high spirits, some of it the result of excessive piety. Yet the fact is that no other work of modern fiction elicits such deep affection from its readers, notwithstanding its length, multiple ...”

“... airport. The cases were too big for the regular X-ray machines, and the airport staff, no doubt exhausted from a long day processing holiday travellers, waved the men and their cargo through. Out on the tarmac, a ground crew worker noticed that one of the cases seemed heavier than it had when he unloaded it that morning. ‘Maybe there is a ...”

“... tradition. He has set himself too big a task, but he performs it as well as one could expect. No single human being could possibly master the massive files on nuclear weapons, from World War Two to Ahmadinejad’s Iran. In addition to the CIA estimates, Richelson relies primarily on standard works – John W. Lewis and ...”

“... felt the same. Britain was in the curious position of being the one great power which could in no possible circumstance acquire European territory by war, but it still did not want Russia to do so, and it became a cardinal point of British policy that Turkey should be protected for as long as possible, which plainly made Russia a potential ...”

“... desperate for a national literature commensurate with its wealth and political ideals. ‘I was in no country of Europe,’ Longfellow observed in one of the many letters read out at a memorial for the novelist in 1852, ‘where the name of Cooper was not familiarly known. In some of them he stands as almost the sole representative of our ...”

“... propitious sign. The fortune you amassed here below testified to your fortunes in the hereafter. No culture has ever found a better spur to hard work – the Puritan ethos famously makes for a spirited form of capitalism. The United States would soon develop a frenzied economics smacking of religious mania. By the 19th century, the race to get ahead had ...”

“... his ideas: ‘Suddenly the whole history of British Pop Art was different.’Well, yes and no. As Marc Kristal suggests in the introduction to his widely researched and delicately judged biography, there was an element of ‘infatuation-driven hyperbole’ in Mellor’s assessment, as there has been in almost everything that has been said and written ...”