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“... record. That currently belongs to Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants, who in 2001 hit the ball out of the park an unprecedented 73 times. McGwire, Sosa and Bonds don’t resemble Roger Maris in physical appearance, but they don’t look much like Babe Ruth either. They are all large, heavy-set men, but no one could call them fat: the extra weight is ...”

“... Tony Blair said on 14 July. ‘As a sovereign nation, Israel has every right to defend itself,’ George W. Bush said on 16 July. By the time these statements were made, the IDF had bombed Beirut’s international airport, destroyed roads, bridges, power stations and petrol stations, and imposed an air and sea blockade. The Israeli army chief of ...”

“... Or perhaps a tribute to it. There are pictures of rooms, a car tyre, an exercise book and a golf ball. Right at the end are paintings in which graded tints show hills rising out of mist with a tiny kitsch-Oriental boat or bridge in the foreground. But only by going back to the original moment – the moment when Life magazine headed an article, ‘Is He the ...”

“... Harry Graham ruthlessness in the stories. The hyena which the girl wishes to take her place at the ball in her story ‘The Debutante’ is direct:       ‘You’re very lucky,’ she said. ‘I’d love to go. I don’t know how to dance, but at least I could make small talk.’       ‘There’ll be a great many different things to eat,’ I ...”

“... 10 per cent to 9.6. Year-on-year listening was down by 700,000 ... At breakfast time, Greening and Ball had lost 82,000 ... while Chris Evans [now at a rival station] had risen by 234,000. Such fidelity to mundane facts requires an element of selflessness, and Garfield has that to a fault. He is not a former DJ. He has never worked at Radio 1. He does not ...”

“... He unveils a somewhat less than visionary plan of action for Israel-Palestine: ‘We kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve.’ He discloses his blueprint for economic recovery, which is that the mere fact of his election will stimulate business, and gloats through a long story about a prison-like ...”

“... them. Late in 1833, Gell guided round the sites the rich, well-born novelist and politician Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, with his termagant of an Irish wife. The spoiled child of a doting mother, Bulwer – he added his mother’s maiden name of Lytton to his own – had had a desultory education, part of it at Cambridge, had experienced a romantic tragedy and ...”

“... it makes. What with his success in the theatre and the suc·cès d'es·time of his novels the ball at this point of the Thirties seemed to have landed at Hamilton’s feet. After various hopeless passions, of the kind that Bob in his trilogy feels for the prostitute Jenny, he had unexpectedly married a sensible girl called Lois, a few years older than ...”

“... he spent time with, even in his palmiest days, were not social butterflies but fellow artists like George Sand and Chopin, and school friends who had become civil servants. Yet his intellectual isolation should not be underestimated. Wilson-Smith’s chapter describing Delacroix’s friendship with Chopin and ...”

“... kissing the ‘velvet’ hand of Lady Garvagh (who was married to a cousin of the prime minister, George Canning), of peeping beneath the scanty rags of a comely Irish harvester, and playing charades with teenage girls in the house of Lady Morgan in Dublin. The tone is oddly like that of someone who is eager to reassure an older sister of his orthodox sexual ...”

“... Chula, who had been a Cambridge undergraduate when Runciman was a young don at Trinity. At a ball in Bangkok a dazzling young woman waved at him and he asked Chula who she was. ‘But you met him the other day. That is the Minister for Education.’ Unfortunately, discretion overcomes him where our own Royal Family is concerned: I seem to remember him ...”

“... Minister admits that the new system will be ‘a few notches’ below public service standards. George Russell, the proposed chairman of the Commission, believes that it will be equivalent to some 80 per cent of the existing public service broadcasting commitment. We are in for a tawdry future. The extent of the anxiety about that future can be measured by ...”

“... to marry. He was reserved, dull and apparently interested only in dogs – when she fainted at a ball during their engagement, he showed no concern, carrying on talking to his friends – though he did have an illegitimate daughter before he married. Still, he proved a better husband than Harriet’s choice, the cold and unpleasant heir of the Earl of ...”

“... Sinatra, his two daughters and Mia Farrow (to whom he was then engaged) were at another table. George, the restaurant captain, came over to the Dunnes’s table. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Dunne. Mr Sinatra made me do it,’ he said, and then he punched Dunne in the head. The Dunnes got up and left, and on the way out, ...”

“... of royal and aristocratic whim. Often they are stories of bizarre adoration, as in the case of George IV and his giraffe, which was captured as a calf in Sudan and sent north to Khartoum trussed up on the back of a camel. From there she was sent by boat to Cairo, on to Malta and then to England, where she arrived in June 1827 and was taken to Windsor. The ...”