“... She beamed like an Intelligent Angel, as she referred to Edna in Love’s Work: it would be a joy. ‘Gosh, yes, she’s very … enthusiastic,’ the philosophy man said when we told him, looking even more unhappy; there was something terribly grudging, I remember thinking, in the way he said it, inadequate entirely to the generosity and excitement with ...”

“... surface glint and sparkle in the late, departing glory of the evening. To many a natural cause of joy, this sight stirred in me the deepest, darkest melancholy. Local sunlight after rain had, quite unaided, the power, not just to make my spirits drop, many things did that, but to convince me, beyond anything that hope could counter, that life would never ...”

“... HBOS, after its boss, Victor Blank – this is the part you couldn’t make up – bumped into Gordon Brown at a drinks party and got him to give an assurance that a takeover would not be referred to the monopolies commission. Most of us have had a few drinks at a party and done something embarrassing, usually along the lines of ...”

“... In her rollicking Lives like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds (2010), Lyndall Gordon suggests that Emily would not have taken well to being excluded from areas of her own house for hours at a time while her brother and his mistress did God knows what behind closed doors. Lavinia, on the other hand, quickly became an accomplice, often ...”

“... victories (Chile 1962); Bobby Moore borne aloft by Geoff Hurst and Ray Wilson (England 1966); Gordon Banks’s ‘Save of the Century’, and Moore and Pelé swapping shirts (Brazil 1970); the Cruyff turn (West Germany 1974); Maradona about to take on six petrified Belgians, and Marco Tardelli’s primal scream (Spain 1982); Maradona’s ‘Hand of ...”